Guest editorial: Business process management

It is a pleasure for us to present this special issue of Data and Knowledge Engineering comprising of the best contributions presented at the 7th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2009). The conference took place in Ulm, Germany, September 8-10, 2009, and was organized by the Institute of Databases and Information Systems of the University of Ulm. The BPM conference series has the ambition to be the premier forum for researchers in the area of process-aware information systems. It has a record for attracting contributions in innovative research of the highest quality related to all aspects of business process management including theory, frameworks, methods, techniques, architectures, and empirical findings. BPM 2009 featured sessions on process modeling, verification and compliance of processes, processes and services, management of processes, and process mining. The program of BPM 2009 consisted of three keynote presentations by highly reputed researchers, 17 contributed research papers, and two contributed industrial papers selected from a total of 116 submissions from 31 countries. The thorough reviewing process – each paper was reviewed by three to five program committee members –was extremely competitive as the acceptance rate of 16% indicates. The best papers were selected after the conference, extended and carefully revised, and then came under scrutiny of another thorough review. Henceforth, the four papers in this special issue are the final result of an intensive quality assurance and improvement process. The first article, “Mining Business Process Variants: Challenges, Scenarios, Algorithms" by Chen Li, Manfred Reichert, and Andreas Wombacher addresses the problems induced by configuration changes and runtime variations of process instances for process mining. The paper introduces two scenarios for learning from process model adaptions and for mining a reference model for processes, which can be used to configure process variants with a minimal effort. In the second paper, "Hierarchical Aggregation of Service Level Agreements", Irfan Ul Haq, Altaf Ahmad Huqqani, and Erich Schikuta analyze the requirements for hierarchical aggregation of service level agreements, which are necessary for the automation of service composition. They propose a technique to aggregate SLAs, as defined at various levels of the hierarchy, to ensure the expected quality of the composed service for different stakeholders. The third paper, "Analysis on Demand: Instantaneous Soundness Checking of Industrial Business Process Models" by Dirk Fahland, Cedric Favre, Jana Koehler, Niels Lohmann, Hagen Völzer, and Karsten Wolf, presents a case study where 735 industrial business process models from different domains have been checked for soundness with three popular tools. As one of their findings, they conclude that the effort of applying these tools is so small that soundness checking can be tightly integrated into process modeling environments. Finally, in the fourth article "Symbolic Abstraction and Deadlock-Freeness Verification of Inter-Enterprise Processes", Kais Klai, Samir Tata, and Jörg Desel study the problem of proving the correctness of modularly composed processes. They propose a verification technique based on symbolic observation graphs, which do not rely on the internal structure of the components. This is the place to express our gratitude to all those who made BPM 2009 and this special issue possible by generously and voluntarily sharing their knowledge, skills and time: the general chairs Peter Dadam and his team for providing an excellent environment for the conference. We are grateful to Peter P. Chen, Editor in-in-Chief of Data and Knowledge Engineering for accepting our proposal for this special issue, and Jie Chen, publishing content coordinator at Elsevier, for her skillful helpand guidance during the production of this special issue. We thank the senior and regular program committee members, as well as the additional reviewers for devoting their expertise and time to ensure the high quality of the conference by the extensive review and discussion process they participated in. And, last but not least, we are grateful to all the authors who showed their appreciation of BPM by submitting their valuable work to it. Palo Alto, Klagenfurt, Eindhoven, January 2011.