DEC2H 2023

Workshop Theme

Rules and decisions define the behavioural constraints and factors determining the achievement of process goals. Business processes frequently involve rule-bound decisions – particularly knowledge-intensive processes, which operate in highly variable contexts and are thus flexible by nature. When describing such processes, variability and flexibility call for explicit statements of the underlying rules and decisions.
While traditional notations such as BPMN excel at describing “happy paths”, they may fall short when modelling flexible and varying rules and decisions, wherein procedural models tend to clutter and become imprecise or impractical. Declarative modelling paradigms (such as Declare, DCR Graphs, DMN, CMMN, GSM, and DPIL) aim to directly capture the business rules or constraints underlying the process and thus tackle this challenge. A promising direction is the hybridisation of procedural and declarative approaches.

In this workshop, we are interested in the application and challenges of decision- and rule-based modelling in all phases of the BPM lifecycle: identification, discovery, analysis, redesign, implementation and monitoring. Contributions are welcome that adopt existing formalisms or introduce novel ones, in the form of completed work (research, case studies and tools) but also work-in-progress and position papers.

Download the Call for Papers

Purpose of the workshop

The purpose of the workshop is:

• to examine the relationship between rules, decisions and processes, including models; not only to model the process, but also to model the rules and decisions;
• to enhance rule and decision mining based on process data (e.g., event logs);
• to examine decision goals, structures, and their connection with business processes, in order to find a good integration between rule- and decision-based modelling and flow-based modelling;
• to examine standards (DMN, CMMN, BPMN) and their integration;
• to study how different process models can be designed to fit a decision process, according to various optimization criteria, such as throughput time, use of resources, etc.;
• to study the integration between declarative models with traditional imperative models;
• to show best practices in separating process, rule and decision concerns.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Submission guidelines

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers on any of the topics of the workshop. We are interested in research, work-in-progress, case-study and tool papers, either in long (not exceeding 12 pages) or short (minimum of 5 pages and not exceeding 10 pages) format, or position / vision papers in a short format.

• Research and work-in-progress papers describe original research work in the broad area of declarative, decision and hybrid approaches to processes. Such papers can report on complete technical work or early results that reveal promising but require more work to get to full maturity.
• Short position or vision papers (not exceeding 6 pages) discuss a novel problem or idea related to the topics of the workshop and can be used as an opportunity to foster discussion at the event and reach out to interested collaborators. Accepted papers will use a special presentation format at the workshop, with a shorter presentation but more room for discussion. Papers in this category will be evaluated with a focus on their novelty and potential to foster an engaged discussion at the workshop.
• Case-study papers report on case-studies and industrial applications of declarative, decision and hybrid approaches to processes. Papers in this category are expected to clearly describe the case being studied, the methodologies used, and their implications for relevant research problems.
• Tool papers describe novel tools supporting declarative, decision and hybrid approaches to processes. Papers in this category will be evaluated based on the novelty and maturity of the tools presented and authors are expected to include artefacts such as links to a demo version of the tool and video tutorials.

The final selection of papers will consider all categories equally, with each paper reviewed according to the expectations for their category.

Only papers in English will be considered. Submitted papers must present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere. Authors are requested to prepare submissions according to the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) format specified by Springer (see the instructions). The title page must contain a short abstract and a list of keywords, preferably using the list of topics given above.

Papers must be submitted electronically via EasyChair: enter the main conference installation (BPM 2023) at easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bpm2023 and select 10th International Workshop on DEClarative, DECision and Hybrid approaches to processes as the submission track.

In addition, we accept nominations for topics and speakers for the killer debate sessions through the following online form: https://forms.gle/js4eYBusAHpYdsSS9

Download the Call for Papers

Special Issue

Depending on their quality, the authors of selected papers in DEC2H will be invited to submit revised and extended versions of their work for a journal special issue.

Important dates

Abstract submission (optional)

Manuscript submission

10 June 2023 AoE Deadline extended!

Notification

30 June 2023

Camera-ready version

14 July 2023

Workshop

12 September 2023 – Read the programme of the workshop

Register

The workshop will begin with a keynote, followed by presentations of accepted papers. Full papers have 20 minutes for their presentations plus 10 minutes for discussion and Q&A. Short papers have 15 plus 5 minutes at their disposal.

Each manuscript will be reviewed by at least three program committee members guaranteeing that only papers presenting high quality work and innovative research in areas relevant to the workshop theme are accepted. Papers that are not accepted, yet reviewed positively, may still be invited for presentation at the workshop.

Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings. The pre-prints will be made available before the workshop starts. The post-proceedings will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series, in a single volume dedicated to the proceedings of all BPM 2023 workshops. During a time window after the conference, the workshop participants will be granted the free download of the papers.

At least one author of each accepted manuscript is required to register for the workshop and present the paper. Registration is subject to the terms, conditions and procedures of the main BPM 2023 conference to be found on its website.

Chiara Di Francescomarino: What else can we do with temporal patterns?

Abstract

Beyond the traditional uses of declarative process models in tasks such as discovery and conformance checking, temporal rules and patterns (usually expressed in the form of LTLf patterns), can also be used for supporting other functionalities in fields like Predictive and Prescriptive Process Monitoring. By offering a suitable representation of temporal data, indeed, temporal patterns can be used as encodings, thus providing, for instance, loosely constraining recommendations and compact discriminative descriptions of the difference between sets of temporal data. Moreover, temporal patterns can be used for representing in a compact way apriori knowledge that can in turn be used to guide predictive models and explainers towards compliance to some apriori rules. This talk will provide an overview of some of these non-traditional usages of temporal patterns.

The keynote speaker

Chiara Di Francescomarino is an Assistant Professor at the Information Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of Trento. Her main research interests are in the field of business process management and, in particular, process mining. She is currently working on investigating problems related to process simulation, procedural and declarative process discovery, predictive and prescriptive process monitoring based on historical execution traces, as well as process prediction explanations. She has published papers in the top business process and information systems conferences and journals (e.g., BPM, TKDE and IS) and she has worked in local and international research projects. She serves as a PC member in conferences in the business process management field and as a peer reviewer in international journals.

• Amine Abbad Andaloussi, University of St Gallen, Switzerland
• Banu Aysolmaz, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
• Christoffer Olling Back, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Andrea Burattin, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
• Carl Corea, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
• João Costa Seco, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal
• Johannes De Smedt, KU Leuven, Belgium
• Chiara Di Francescomarino, University of Trento, Italy
• Rik Eshuis, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
• Amin Jalali, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Krzysztof Kluza, AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland
• Hugo A. López, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Fabrizio Maria Maggi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
• Andrea Marrella, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
• Artem Polyvyanyy, The University of Melbourne, Australia
• Andrey Rivkin, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
• Flavia Santoro, UERJ, Brazil
• Stefan Schönig, University of Regensburg, Germany
• Mathias Weske, HPI, University of Potsdam, Germany
• Han van der Aa, University of Mannheim, Germany

• María Teresa Gómez-López, University of Seville, Spain
• Claudio Di Ciccio, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
• Tijs Slaats, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Jan Vanthienen, KU Leuven, Belgium

Contact the chairs at the following email address: DEC2H [at] di [dot] uniroma1 [dot] it