Speaker: Matthias Weidlich, Humboldt University

Title:
A Declarative Angle to Process Model Analysis - The 4C Spectrum of
Behavioural Relations

Abstract:

Process models play a key role in the development of software systems,
whether they are used to document system requirements or serve as
implementation artefacts. In recent years, it was advocated to ground
analysis of process models not directly in their inherent procedural
description, but rather to rely on a declarative characterization of
their behaviour. Then, behavioural relations are defined over pairs of
actions of the model and capture characteristics of the occurrences of
these actions, such as exclusiveness, concurrency, or precedence.

In this talk, we first give an overview of applications of behavioural
relations for analysis, reaching from similarity search, over change
propagation, to log-based conformance analysis. However, we observe that
many of these techniques can be instantiated with different sets of
behavioural relations, whereas even for a single semantics assumed for a
process model, there is a lack of understanding of subtle differences in
the definition of such relations. Therefore, in the second part of the
talk, we explore this spectrum of behavioural relations for the case of
process models that are given as Petri nets and interpreted under
linear-time, concurrent semantics. For this setting, we introduce the 4C
spectrum of behavioural relations that captures four fundamental
properties: co-occurrence, conflict, causality, and concurrency. We show
that this spectrum gives rise to implication lattices and also highlight
operationalisations for some of the relations.

Bio:

Matthias will start as an assistant-professor in the Department of
Computer Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, in April
2015. There, he will head an Emmy Noether research group funded by the
German Science Foundation (DFG). Currently, he is a post-doctoral
research associate in the Department of Computing at Imperial College
London, United Kingdom. Before joining Imperial in 2013, he was a
research fellow and adjunct lecturer at the Technion - The Israel
Institute of Technology, Israel. He received his PhD in Computer
Science from the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), University of
Potsdam, Germany, in 2011. His research focuses on process modelling
and analysis, event-based systems, data interoperability, and
uncertainty management. His results appeared in journals, such as
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on
Knowledge and Data Engineering, Information Systems, and The Computer
Journal. For his work, he received the Grand Challenge Audience Award
at DEBS 2014 and DEBS 2013, and the Best Paper Award at ICSOC 2010.