Manfred Reichert was invited keynote speaker of the International Workshop on Business Processes in Collective Adaptive Systems (BPCAS’14), which was held in conjunction with the BPM 2014 conference.  BPM 2014 took place in Eindhoven from September 8 – 11, 2014.  It is the 12th conference in a series that provides the most prestigious forum for researchers and practitioners in the field of Business Process Management (BPM). Due to the unstable situation in Southern Israel, BPM 2014 was relocated from Haifa, Israel, to Eindhoven.

In his keynote, Manfred reported on the challenges related to adaptive collective process-aware information systems and some of the technologies our DBIS Institute has developed to enable such systems. The socio-technical fabric of our society more and more depends on systems that are constructed as a collective of heterogeneous components and that are tightly entangled with humans and social structures. Their components increasingly need to be able to evolve, collaborate and function as a part of an artificial society. 

Manfred Reichert - Collective Adaptive Process-Aware Systems: Challenges, Scenarios, Techniques
Invited Keynote, Int'l Workshop on Business Processes in Collective Adaptive Systems (BPCAS'14), Eindhoven, 8 September 2014

Background:
Industry is increasingly demanding coordination support for adaptive process structures consisting of large collections of autonomous, interacting processes. Engineering a car, for example, requires the coordination of development processes for hundreds of car components across organizational borders. Each of these development processes itself comprises a number of interdependent processes for designing, testing, and releasing the respective component. Usually, the resulting process structure becomes very large and is characterized by a strong relation with the assembly of the product. A particular challenge of any collective adaptive process-aware system supporting this kind of scenario is to allow for dynamic adaptations of single autonomous processes, while preservering the consistency of its interactions with other dependent processes. This keynote talk will discuss the challenges emerging in this context. Further, it will give insights into advanced techniques tackling these challenges and enabling advanced support for collective, adaptive and process-aware systems.