Goal orchestrations: Modelling and mining flexible business processes

Abstract

In many application domains, it is more natural to think of a process as a coordination model of goals to be achieved rather than of tasks or acitivities to be performed. Replacing tasks or activities with goals in process models allows us to enact processes in flexible, context-sensitive ways. We define a formal semantics for processes modeled in this manner (which we call goal orchestrations) and show how these enable flexible process execution. We also offer a simple means of mining goal orchestrations from readily available event logs, and present an evaluation with an event log consisting of 65000 entries from one of the world’s largest IT companies.