Another successful acquisition of a third-party funded project by the Institute of Databases and Information Systems (DBIS). Together with its industrial partner Persis, DBIS will receive a research grant from the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) in the context of the Zentrales Innovationprogramm Mittelstand (Central Innovation Programme for SMEs). Persis, a medium-sized company and a longstanding industrial partner of DBIS, is a technology leader in the area of human resource magement software. The cooperation project entitled "Rapid development and adaptation of process- and data-centric applications based on a generic software technology” will run over 3 years and has an overall volume of about 350.000 EUR.

Backgrounds

The acquired project is the newest joint endeavor of DBIS and Persis. Following the footsteps of the very successful PHILharmonicFlows project, also a cooperation between DBIS and Persis, the project aims at examining further issues related to the new field of object-aware process management. The latter enables the tight object-centric integration of business data and business processes. Furthermore, it allows for a high level of flexibility for end-users while executing business processes.

The project will evolve the notions introduced in object-aware process management by adding increased build-time flexibility to the high level of runtime flexibility made possible by the PHILharmonicFlows framework. This includes support for object and process variants, schema evolution and object inheritance. Furthermore, work will be done concerning the topic of traceability in object-aware processes, which is quite challenging when compared to traceability in traditional, activity-centric process management systems. Lastly, the project will deliver methods for implementing the very fine-grained authorization and access rights system necessary in object-aware workflows. Two PhD students supervised by Prof. Manfred Reichert will work in the project.

As the project is a cooperation with Persis GmbH, Ulm University will have a strong industry partner who will lead the development of a prototype incorporating the technologies generated by this project.

We will periodically report about the progress of the project on its homepage.