Business Process Management (BPM) is increasingly gaining attention in industry due to its positive effects on cost, quality, flexibility and time of business operations. In the WSO2 Carbon Framework, BPM is enabled through the Business Process Server (BPS) which provides a platform for efficient execution of business processes based on the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). The life cycle of a business process basically consists of process design, process execution, process monitoring and process analysis. This talk focuses on the monitoring and analysis phase. In particular, it addressed process instance monitoring and performance analysis. The Carbon Framework supports process monitoring and analysis through the Business Activity Monitor. However, this component considers process monitoring at the level of key performance indicators, while in this talk we focus on providing insight into the execution status of one single process instance based on a process graph.

In recent BPM research, “Process Views” have become a hot topic. Process views are a means to tackle the increasing complexity of business processes – a common business process may contain hundreds of activities which makes it hard to understand and manage (and monitor). We understand a process view as the graphical representation of a process to which particular transformations, called “view transformations”, have been applied. The main purposes of these transformations are the summarizing of information as well as abstraction to reduce complexity and ease understanding. For different stakeholders, different views on a process are useful which provide insight into particular aspects of a process while abstracting from irrelevant details. The most common forms of view transformations are the omission of process structures, their aggregation, and the change of the appearance of process structures and related artifacts. For instance, activities can be displayed with different background colors, enriched with icons, or with varying size depending on their importance.