Research Overview, Fall 2009
Introduction
The following 2003 ISR paper on inter-organizational workflows has been well cited in literature:
W.M.P. van der Aalst and A. Kumar, XML Based Schema Definition for Support of Inter-organizational Workflow, Information Systems Research, Vol. 14, No. 1, 23-47, March 2003.
For more than ten years, an
important area of research for me has been business process management and
workflows. I have studied various aspects of workflow management such as
modeling, analysis, verification and optimization.
Holistic and flexible approaches for workflow
modeling
A large body of research in the workflow area has focused on designing workflows from a control flow perspective. Thus, over the last 15 years hundreds of papers have been written on design and verification of a "better" control-flow based workflow. In doing so the workflow community has largely neglected many other aspects of workflow such as data modeling, resource modeling, policy modeling, exception handling, etc. The focus of this new line of research is to promote more holistic frameworks and approaches for workflow design. It also attempts to more closely integrate workflow design with database design.
Sample publication:
Kumar, A., BPM The Case for Standard, Holistic and Flexible Process Modeling Techniques, September 2009. (Industry Briefing). (pdf)
Kumar, A and Wang, J., "A framework for designing resource driven workflow systems," The International Handbook on Business Process Management, M. Rosemann and J. vom Brocke (eds.), 2009 (forthcoming). (pdf)
Composition of business processes
When two businesses interact in
an automated manner, their processes should be compatible for interoperation to
be successful. In this research we look at new techniques for checking if two
business processes (say, running in different organizations) are compatible,
and develop algorithms for composing them with the help of adapters.
Sample publications:
A. Kumar, Z. Shan. Algorithms Based on Pattern Analysis for
Verification and Adapter Creation for Business Process Composition, CoopIS'08,
OTM Conferences, November 2008, 120-138 (pdf).
Business process compliance and conceptual
design of online auditing tools
This work looks at ways to
incorporate policy constraints into the design of business processes. Such
constraints are dictated by the government authorities, internal management and
other constituents of a business organization. The vision is to allow a
business to be able to audit and correct itself in a (semi-)automated manner
for its internal purposes and also to meet the requirements of legislation such
as Sarbanes-Oxley.
Sample publications:
W. van der Aalst, K. van Hee, J. M. van der Werf, A. Kumar and M. Verdonk. Conceptual Model for On Line Auditing, July 2009. Working paper (pdf).
Kumar and R. Liu. A Rule-Based Framework to Design Compliant Business Processes Using Role Patterns, The International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications , RULEML-2008, Orlando, Florida: October 30-31, 2008.
J. Wainer, A. Kumar and P. Barthelmess, DW-RBAC: A Formal Security Model of Delegation and Revocation in Workflow Systems," Information Systems , Volume 32, Issue 3, May 2007, Pages 365-384.
Quality metrics for Process Mining
In recent years there has been increasing interest in extracting knowledge from business process logs. This knowledge allows us to infer relationships between tasks in a process and relates to process patterns. Thus, it is possible to infer that two tasks in a process are always in sequence, or parallel, or some other pattern, and in this way it is possible to deduce the entire process representation from the log. However, real world logs are noisy and it is necessary to separate noise from actual data. Our work is geared towards metrics of process quality that enable us to design algorithms to extract high quality process models.
Sample publications:
Z. Huang and A. Kumar, A
Study of Quality and Accuracy Tradeoffs in Process Mining, Working paper, June 2009 (pdf).
Z. Huang and A. Kumar. New
Quality Metrics for Evaluating Process Models, BPI workshop (BPM'08
Conference), Milan, Italy, Sept. 2008.
Workflow verification
When an end user designs a workflow process, it should be possible to check that the process is correct and will not deadlock or otherwise misbehave when executed. This work examines unstructured workflows designed using process graphs. We study techniques for analyzing the process graphs, and developing formal methods and tools that would produce detailed diagnosis so a user can correct the graphs.
Sample publications:
R. Eshuis and A. Kumar. An Integer Programming based Approach for
Verification and Diagnoses of Workflows. Targeted for submission to Information
Systems, July 2009.
R. Liu and A. Kumar, "An Analysis and Taxonomy of Unstructured Workflows," Third International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2005), Nancy, France, Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, September 2005.
Modeling supply chain processes for Sense-and-Respond
This work develops and evaluates formal techniques for supply chain processes. In particular we examine how events can cascade through a supply chain and produce unintended consequences. The goal is to be able to predict the effect of unusual events and take preemptive action. We have also studied the effect of information sharing on supply chains.
Sample publications:
R. Liu, A. Kumar, Leveraging information sharing to configure supply chains. Working
Paper, July 2009.
R. Liu, A. Kumar and W.M.P. van der Aalst , "A formal modeling approach for supply chain event management," Decision Support Systems 43, 3 (April 2007) 761-778.
R. Liu, A. Kumar, and W.M.P. van der Aalst. Managing Supply Chain Events to Build Sense-and-Response Capability. In D. Straub and S. Klein, editors, Proceedings of International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2006) , Milwaukee, Wisconsin , December 2006.
Liu, R., Kumar, A., and Stenger, A. J. 2006. Simulation results for supply chain configurations based on information sharing. In Proceedings of the 37th Conference on Winter Simulation (Monterey , California , December 03 - 06, 2006). L. F. Perrone, B. G. Lawson, J. Liu, and F. P. Wieland, Eds. Winter Simulation Conference. Winter Simulation Conference, 627-635.
Improving
reliability and survivability of supply networks
Reliability and survivability of supply networks is very important, especially in defense and military applications. Scale free networks have certain useful properties that can be exploited to improve performance of networks. We are developing a general class of supply networks based on the properties of scale free networks, and analyzing their performance on metrics such as path length, availability, largest cluster size, etc.
K. Zhao, A. Kumar and J. Yen, Analyzing the Trade-offs in the Robustness of Supply Networks against Disruptions.. Working Paper. September 2009. (pdf).
Workflow
task scheduling based on worker compatibility
In this work I have developed a new technique for optimizing assignments to workers in a workflow process instance so as to maximize overall compatibility between workers performing related tasks where compatibility between handoffs can affect performance. The approach is based on formulating the problem as an integer programming model, and showing that it produces much better solutions as compared to a naοve heuristic.
· Kumar, A. Optimal
work assignment in team processes for maximizing cooperation. Working Paper, July 2009. (pdf)
Penn State University
akhil@psu.edu