MPB 2023/24 (295AA / 372AA, 6 cfu)
Lecturer: Roberto Bruni
Contact: web - email - phone 050 2212785 - fax 050 2212726
Office hours: Wednesday 16:00-18:00 or by appointment
The course aims to reconcile abstraction techniques and high-level diagrammatic notations together with modular and structural approaches. The objective is to show the impact of the analysis and verification properties of business processes on the choice of the best suited specification and modelling languages. At the end of the course, the students will gain some familiarity with business process terminology, with different models and languages for the representation of business processes, with different kinds of logical properties that such models can satisfy and with different analysis and verification techniques. The students will also experiment with some tools for the design and analysis of business processes.
Business process management. Evolution of Enterprise Systems Architectures. Conceptual models and abstraction mechanisms. Petri nets: invariants, S-systems, T-systems, Free-choice systems and their properties. Workflow nets and workflow modules. Workflow patterns. Event-driven Process Chains (EPC). Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), Process performance analysis. Process simulation. Process Mining.
Date | Time | Name | Place | |
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day | date | time | session start | Microsoft Teams |
date | name | Project: Pending/Approved | ||
time | session end |
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The evaluation will be based on a group project and an oral exam.
Registration to the exam is mandatory.
The student must demonstrate the ability to put into practice and to execute, with critical awareness, the activities illustrated or carried out under the guidance of the teacher during the course.
BPM project request
in the object, and mandatorily including full names, student ids and email addresses of all students in the group). The teacher will then reply (in a few days) with the project description.Microsoft Teams: Additional material is available on Teams.
N | Date | Time | Room | Lecture notes | Topics | Links |
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- | 19/09 | 11:00-13:00 | canceled | |||
1 | 21/09 | 16:00-18:00 | L1 | Lecture 1 | Course introduction: course objectives, textbooks, BPM aim and motivation, models and abstraction | |
2 | 26/09 | 11:00-13:00 | M1 | Lecture 2 | Introduction to Business Processes: Taylorism, work units, processes, terminology, organizational structures, process orientation and reengineering, visual notations | |
3 | 28/09 | 16:00-18:00 | L1 | Exercises Lecture 3 (1st part) | Exercises: Alice-Bob car selling scenario Examples: Orchestration diagrams, collaboration diagrams, choreography diagrams | |
4 | Exercises Lecture 4 | Examples and Exercises Business Process Modelling Abstractions: Separation of concerns, horizontal abstraction, aggregation abstraction, vertical abstraction | ||||
5 | Lecture 5 Lecture 6 | Business Processes Lifecyle: design and analysis, configuration, enactment, evaluation, administration and stakeholders Business Process Methodology: levels of business processes, business strategies, operational goals, organizational BP, operational BP, implemented BP, design guidelines, from business functions to processes, separation of concerns, sw architectures, individual enterprise applications, enterprise resource planning system, siloed enterprise applications, enterprise application integration, message-oriented middleware, enterprise service computing | ||||
6 | Lecture 7 Lecture 8 (1st part) | From automata to nets: Inductive definitions, Kleene star, finite state automata, transition function, destination function, language accepted by an automaton, from automata to Petri nets, places, transitions, tokens Petri nets basics: multisets and markings, transition enabling and firing | ||||
7 | Exercises (from Lecture 7) Lecture 8 (2nd part) | Petri nets basics: firing sequences, reachable markings, occurrence graph, modelling with Petri nets, examples Woped basics | Woped | |||
8 | Exercises (from Lecture 8) Lecture 9 (1st part) | Petri nets basics: modelling with Petri nets, examples and exercises Woped basics Behavioural properties: liveness, non live transitions, dead transitions | ||||
9 | Lecture 9 (2nd part) | Behavioural properties: place liveness, non live places, dead places, deadlock freedom, boundedness, safeness, cyclicity Structural properties: weak and strong connectedness, S-systems, T-systems, free-choice nets | ||||
10 | Exercises (from Lecture 9) Lecture 10 (1st part) | Nets as matrices: markings as vectors, incidence matrices, Parikh vectors, marking equation lemma, monotonicity lemma (1, 2 and corollary) | ||||
11 | Lecture 10 (2nd part) Exercises (from Lecture 10) Lecture 11 (1st part) | Nets as matrices: boundedness lemma, repetition lemma Invariants: S-invariants, fundamental property of S-invariants, alternative characterization of S-invariant, support, positive S-invariants, about boundedness and liveness | ||||
12 | Lecture 11 (2nd part) Lecture 13 (1st part) | Invariants: S-invariants and reachability, T-invariants, fundamental property of T-invariants, alternative characterization of T-invariants, reproduction lemma, about liveness and boundedness Workflow nets: definition, syntax sugar, subprocesses, control flow aspects |
Microsoft Teams: Additional material is available on Teams.
N | Date | Time | Room | Lecture notes | Topics | Links |
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13 | Exercises (from Lecture 11) Exercises (from Lecture 13) Lecture 13 (2nd part) Lecture 14 (1st part) | Workflow nets: triggers Analysis of workflow nets: structural analysis, activity analysis, token analysis, net analysis, verification and validation, reachability analysis, coverability graph, soundness, N* | ||||
14 | Lecture 12 Lecture 14 (2nd part) Lecture 15 Exercises (from Lecture 15) | On strong connectedness: connectedness theorems Analysis of workflow nets: strong connectedness of N*, main soundness theorem Safe Workflow nets: soundness (and safeness) by construction | Woped | |||
15 | Exercises (form Lecture 14) Lecture 16 Exercises (from Lecture 16) Lecture 17 Exercises (from Lecture 17) | S-systems: fundamental property of S-systems, S-invariants of S-nets, liveness theorem, reachability lemma, reachability theorem, boundedness theorem, workflow S-nets T-systems: circuits and token count on a circuit, fundamental property of T-systems, T-invariants of T-nets, boundedness in strongly connected T-systems, liveness theorem for T-systems, workflow T-nets | Woped | |||
16 | Lecture 18 A note on P and NP (optional reading) | Free-choice nets: Fundamental property of free-choice nets, clusters, stable sets, siphons, proper siphons, fundamental property of siphons, siphons and liveness, Rank theorem, traps, place-liveness = liveness in f.c. nets, Commoner's theorem and its complexity issues, Rank theorem and its complexity issues, sound f.c wf nets are safe Decision problems and computational complexity (optional reading) | ||||
17 | Exercises (from Lecture 18) Lecture 19 Lecture 20 | Diagnosis of Workflow nets: Woped, S-components, S-cover, TP-handles, PT-handles, well-handled nets, well-structured wf nets, Woflan, ProM, error sequences, non-live sequences, unbounded sequences Workflow systems: I/O interfaces, workflow modules, stuctural compatibility, workflow system, weak soundness | Woped Woflan ProM |
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18 | Exercises (from Lecture 19) Exercises (from Lecture 20) Lecture 21 (1st part) | EPC: Events, functions, connectors, EPC diagrams, guidelines, soundness analysis, from EPC to wf nets, net fragments, dummy style, fusion style, unique start, unique end, three transformations, semantics ambiguities, relaxed sound nets, relaxed sound EPC diagrams, from restricted EPC diagrams to f.c. nets | Woped Woflan ProM VP yEd |
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19 | Lecture 21 (2nd part) Exercises (from Lecture 21) Lecture 22 (1st part) | EPC: problems with (X)OR joins, candidate split, corresponding split, matching split, OR join policies (wfa, fc, et), from decorated EPC diagrams to nets BPMN: Notation, swimlanes, flow objects, artefacts, connecting objects, collaborations | Yaoqiang BPMN.io BPMS Bizagi VP ProM |
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20 | Lecture 22 (2nd part) Lecture 23 | BPMN: collaborations, choreographies, from BPMN to nets Quantitative analysis: Performance dimensions and objectives, KPI, cyle time analysis, Little's law, cost analysis | ||||
21 | Exercises (from Lecture 22) Exercises (from Lecture 23) Lecture 24 | Process mining: intro, Event logs, discovery, conformance, enhancement, perspectives, play-in, play-out, replay, overfitting, underfitting, alpha-algorithm, footprint matrix, naive fitness, improved fitness, comparing footprints A final note (with project instructions) | ||||
end |
Date | Time | Room | Info | |
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day | date | time | Teams | Exam Exams registration system The actual date of the oral exam will be agreed with the teacher |