Process Intelligence in Business Informatics

The research group "Process Intelligence in Business Informatics" is situated at the Fraunhofer IAIS in Sankt Augustin. Our credo is that the most promising level to think about companies and multi-agent systems is the process level. In this sense, an agent as well as a company can best be viewed as a running process. Optimizing an enterprise or agent behavior is thus a question of process modelling. We are working in the areas of process modelling, agent-based simulation of processes and critical infrastructure protection.

Up to this point, some of our most important contributions are the following:

• LAMPS ("Language for agent-based modelling of processes and scenarios"):
  One of the most prolific tools in our research is the process-modelling language LAMPS ("Language for agent-based modelling of processes and scenarios"), which is based on hierarchical petri-nets and has been developed in this research group. It employs the inherent properties of classical petri-nets - such as concurrence and distributedness - and combines them with the requirements of modern service-oriented architectures and agent-systems.
• Flip Tick Architecture (FTA):
  At its core, FTA is a design paradigm for scalable distributed systems that exhibit a priorily unknown dynamic characteristics as well as disturbances and inaccuracies which are difficult, if not impossible, to model in a closed-form mathematical approach. As every multi-agent system, FTA is based on the concept of a society of agents. It guarantees the autonomy of each agent and controls the scheduling during the simulation.
• Critical Infrastructure Protection:
  While Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) is an exciting research area in itself, it serves also as one of the application areas of our research in process modelling. Our main insight is that the crucial interdependencies between different sectors of critical infrastructures basically are most important in the process-phase. In order to facilitate the management of these process-interdependencies we develop models and methods that handle the risks and effects of infrastructure services.
  
  

In the future we are heading towards the following research topics:

• Induction of process models:
  As our newest endeavour, we are investigating new approaches for automatically learning process models from observations.
• IT-Convergence:
  In our industry projects we develop insights for business architectures, stating that there is a trend towards IT-convergence. Products, processes and business models are increasingly determined by IT-architectures.
• Front-Loading:
  Another new exciting area in our research deals with transferring concepts from software-technology to business models in order to optimize product launch processes.

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