Final Appraisal Seminar for Tenure Track Assistant Professor Tijs Slaats

Title: Declarative and Hybrid Process Technologies

Abstract:

Knowledge-intensive processes, such as those encountered in healthcare, finance and government, tend to allow a large degree of flexibility: there are many possible solutions towards a goal, and it is left to the expertise of knowledge workers to find the one most suitable for the particular case at hand.

As a result, such processes usually exhibit more varied behaviour than traditional production processes. This poses a challenge for traditional imperative, flow-based, process modelling notations, which tend to result in overly complex models when representing many alternative paths. It has been proposed that one should focus on modelling the constraints of the process instead, based on the assumption that such a declarative process model can describe highly varied behaviour more concisely and is more straightforward to adapt when changes need to be made.

However, such declarative languages pose novel challenges towards understandability and require process modellers to make a significant paradigm shift. Hybrid process notations and technologies, that combine aspects from the imperative and declarative world, have been proposed as a means to bridge this gap.

In this talk I will introduce and reflect on my primary research activities during the first four years of my tenure-track, including work on the declarative Dynamic Condition Response (DCR) Graphs process notation, hybrid process notations and technologies, automated process discovery, and the application of static analysis to test-driven modelling. I will conclude by sketching future plans, including the application of binary classification to process discovery and the development of a DCR-based smart contract notation for process-aware distributed ledgers.

Wish to attend?

The seminar will be hosted online and be open to anyone interested at this link.

Assessment Committee
Associate Dean of Reasearch Morten Pejrup, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (Chairperson)
Head of Department, Professor Mads Nielsen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Associate professor Martin Lillholm, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Professor Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, University of Vienna, Austria
Associate professor Marco Montali, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

Academic supervisor
Professor Jørgen P. Bansler, University of Copenhagen, Denmark