Processes are traditionally captured by adopting a case-centric approach: there is one specific object type (called "case type") to which activities in the process refer to, and each process instance focuses on the evolution of one single case object in isolation. This is not only apparent in contemporary process modelling notation, but also clearly emerges in process mining, where an event log typically consists of a set of traces, one per case object. Real processes are often much more complex: they co-evolve multiple objects at once, depending on one-to-many and many-to-many relationships binding together such objects. In this spectrum, case-centricity leads to oversimplified representations of reality, and to wrong data-driven analyses. The goal of the talk is to motivate the need for a paradigm shift from “case-centric” to “object-centric” processes, and to point out how data and models have to be rethought in the light of object-centricity. Building on this basis, two new process modeling approaches are brought forward, one based on declarative constraints, and the other founded in Petri nets. The talk then completes with key open challenges related to formal analysis and mining in this fascinating, emerging spectrum.

Marco Montali is Associate Professor and Vice-Dean of Teaching at the Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, where he also coordinates the MSc Program in Computational Data Science. He investigates foundational and applied techniques grounded in artificial intelligence, formal methods, knowledge representation and reasoning, for the model- and data-driven analysis of business processes and multiagent systems. He was/will be PC Chair of BPM 2018, ICPM 2020, and CBI 2021, and is steering committee member of the IEEE task force on process mining. He is co-author of more than 170 papers, many of which in top-tier conferences and journals, and recipient of 8 best paper awards. He received the “Marco Cadoli 2015” award, given by the Italian Association of Artificial Intelligence to the best under 35 Italian researcher who autonomously contributed to advance the state-of-the-art in Artificial Intelligence.

May 26, 2021 1pm - 2pm - Online

After registration, you will receive an invite at a later point in time.
Registration is free, but there will be a limited number of seats.