niPRO - Personalized and Intelligent Process Portals
Project Description
Providing both flexible and effective IT support for business processes has become crucial for enterprises to stay competitive in their market. Business processes must be defined, implemented, deployed, enacted, monitored, and continuously adapted to changing situations. Consequently, process life cycle support and continuous process improvement become critical success factors in enterprise computing. A broad spectrum of enterprise information systems (e.g., SCM systems, PDM systems, and ERP systems) has to be aligned to various businessprocesses ranging from administrative services to knowledge-intensive engineering processes. In response to this need numerous process support paradigms (e.g., workflow management, service flow management, case handling), process specification standards (e.g., WS-BPEL, BPML, BPMN), process tools (e.g., ARIS Toolset, Tibco Staffware, FLOWer), and supporting methods have emerged in recent years. Being summarized under the term "Business Process Management" (BPM), these paradigms, standards, tools, and methods have become a success-critical instrument for improving process performance.
Research in the area of BPM has traditionally focused on the development and extension of associated tools, methods, standards and technologies. However, when dealing with (cross-organizational) BPM initiatives, the role of knowledge workers and information logistics in process-driven environments has been neglected so far. This is surprising as today's knowledge workers can only provide ineffective and inefficient support without having access to explicit knowledge about business processes.
The niPRO project (funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under Support Code 17102X10) picks up this issue. Its goal is to use innovative semantic technology to integrate relevant process information in intelligent, user-adequate process information portals (also denoted as process cockpits). Our niPRO process cockpit shall supply knowledge workers with both structured and unstructured process information in the right place in due course. Thereby, structured process information is typically provided by enterprise information systems by means of logged execution data. Examples of unstructured process information include textual process descriptions, procedural requirements, forms, guidelines, and checklists.
In order to achieve the aforementioned project goal, the following sub-goals have to be addressed:
- Context-aware retrieval and provision of relevant process information
- Group-oriented, role-driven access on process information (i.e., personalization)
- Semantic integration of structured, semi-structured and unstructured process information
- Semantic analysis and preparation of process information
- Innovative visualization of process information in intelligent and user-adequate process cockpits
The project's main application domain are the support of complex electric / electronic development processes in the automotive industry. Additional application scenarios from the e-health domain are considered as well.
For more information, please visit the project homepage.
Project Details

Project Team
Prof. Dr. Bela Mutschler University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten | |
Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert Ulm University, Institute of Databases and Information Systems | |
Markus Hipp Daimler AG, Corporate Research | |
Bernd Michelberger University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten |
Project Partners
University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten
University of Ulm, Institute of Databases and Information Systems
Funding
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (Project No. 17102X10)
Duration
The niPRO project has been running since 2010.
Additional Information
Publications
2017
Michelberger, Bernd and Hipp, Markus and Mutschler, Bela (2017) Process-Oriented Information Logistics: Requirements, Techniques, Application. Intelligent Systems Reference Library 123, Springer, In: Advances in Intelligent Process-Aware Information Systems Concepts, Methods, and Technologies. pp. 127-153. |
2015
Hipp, Markus (2015) Navigating in Complex Process Model Collections. Phd thesis, Ulm University. | ![]() |
Michelberger, Bernd (2015) Process-Oriented Information Logistics: Aligning Process Information with Business Processes. Phd thesis, Ulm University. | ![]() |
Ulmschneider, Klaus and Michelberger, Bernd and Glimm, Birte and Mutschler, Bela and Reichert, Manfred (2015) On Maintaining Semantic Networks: Challenges, Algorithms, Use Cases. International Journal of Web Information Systems, 11(3): 291-326, Emerald, 10.1108/IJWIS-04-2015-0014. | ![]() |
2014
Hipp, Markus and Michelberger, Bernd and Mutschler, Bela and Reichert, Manfred (2014) Navigating in Process Model Repositories and Enterprise Process Information. In: IEEE 8th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS 2014), Marrakesh, Morocco, May 28-30, 2014, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 1-12. | ![]() |
Hipp, Markus and Strauss, Achim and Michelberger, Bernd and Mutschler, Bela and Reichert, Manfred (2014) Enabling a User-Friendly Visualization of Business Process Models. In: Business Process Management Workshops 2014, 3rd Int'l Workshop on Theory and Applications of Process Visualization (TaProViz'14), Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 8 September 2014, LNBIP 202, Springer, pp. 395-407. | ![]() |
Michelberger, Bernd and Mutschler, Bela and Binder, Daniel and Meurer, Jan and Hipp, Markus (2014) iGraph: Intelligent Enterprise Information Logistics. In: 10th International Conference on Semantic Systems (SEMANTiCS'14), Posters & Demonstrations Track, Leipzig, Germany, September 2014, CEUR Workshop Proceedings 1224, CEUR-WS.org, pp. 27-30. | ![]() |
Michelberger, Bernd and Ulmschneider, Klaus and Glimm, Birte and Mutschler, Bela and Reichert, Manfred (2014) Maintaining Semantic Networks: Challenges and Algorithms. In: 16th Int'l Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (iiWAS 2014), Hanoi, Vietnam, 4-6 December 2014, ACM Press, pp. 365-374. | ![]() |
2013
Hipp, Markus and Michelberger, Bernd and Mutschler, Bela and Reichert, Manfred (2013) A Framework for the Intelligent Delivery and User-Adequate Visualization of Process Information. In: 28th Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC'13), Coimbra, Portugal, March 2013, ACM Press, pp. 1383-1390. | ![]() |
Michelberger, Bernd and Andris, Ralph-Josef and Girit, Hasan and Mutschler, Bela (2013) A Literature Survey on Information Logistics. In: 16th Intl Conf. on Business Information Systems (BIS 2013), Poznan, Poland, June 2013, LNBIP 157, Springer, pp. 138-150. | ![]() |
Michelberger, Bernd and Mutschler, Bela and Hipp, Markus and Reichert, Manfred (2013) Determining the Link and Rate Popularity of Enterprise Process Information. In: 21st Int'l Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS 2013), Graz, Austria, 11-13 Sept 2013, LNCS 8185, Springer, pp. 112-129. | ![]() |
Michelberger, Bernd and Reisch, Armin and Mutschler, Bela and Wurzer, Jörg and Hipp, Markus and Reichert, Manfred (2013) iCare: Intelligent Medical Information Logistics. In: 15th Int'l Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (iiWAS 2013), Vienna, Austria, December 2-4, 2013, ACM Press, pp. 396-399. | ![]() |
2012
Girit, Hasan and Eberhard, Robert and Michelberger, Bernd and Mutschler, Bela (2012) On the Precision of Search Engines: Results from a Controlled Experiment. In: 15th Int'l Conference on Business Information Systems (BIS 2012), Vilnius, Lithuania, 21-23 May, 2012, LNBIP 117, Springer, pp. 201-212. | ![]() |
Hipp, Markus and Mutschler, Bela and Reichert, Manfred (2012) Navigating in Complex Business Processes. In: Proc. 23rd Int'l Conf on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA'12), Part II, Vienna, Austria, September 3-6, 2012, LNCS 7447, Springer, pp. 466-480. | ![]() |
Michelberger, Bernd and Mutschler, Bela and Reichert, Manfred (2012) A Context Framework for Process-oriented Information Logistics. In: 15th Int'l Conference on Business Information Systems (BIS 2012), Vilnius, Lithuania, 21-23 May, 2012, LNBIP 117, Springer, pp. 260-271. | ![]() |
Michelberger, Bernd and Mutschler, Bela and Reichert, Manfred (2012) Process-oriented Information Logistics: Aligning Enterprise Information with Business Processes. In: 16th IEEE International EDOC Conference (EDOC 2012), Beijing, China, September 2012, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 21-30. | ![]() |
2011
Hipp, Markus and Mutschler, Bela and Reichert, Manfred (2011) Navigating in Process Model Collections: A new Approach Inspired by Google Earth. In: Proc. BPM'11 Workshops, 1st Int. Workshop on Process Model Collections (PMC 2011), Clermont-Ferrand, France, August 2011, LNBIP, Springer, pp. 92-103. | ![]() |
Hipp, Markus and Mutschler, Bela and Reichert, Manfred (2011) On the Context-aware, Personalized Delivery of Process Information: Viewpoints, Problems, and Requirements. In: 6th Int'l Conf. on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES'11), Industrial Track, Vienna, Austria, August 22nd - 26th, 2011, pp. 390-397. | ![]() |
Michelberger, Bernd and Mutschler, Bela and Reichert, Manfred (2011) On Handling Process Information: Results from Case Studies and a Survey. In: Proc. BPM'11 Workshops, 2nd Int'l Workshop on Empirical Research in Business Process Management (ER-BPM'11), Clermont-Ferrand, France, August 2011, LNBIP 99, Springer, pp. 333-344. | ![]() |
Michelberger, Bernd and Mutschler, Bela and Reichert, Manfred (2011) Towards Process-oriented Information Logistics: Why Quality Dimensions of Process Information Matter. In: Proc. 4th Int'l Workshop on Enterprise Modelling and Information Systems Architectures (EMISA 2011), Hamburg, September 2011, Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) 190, Koellen-Verlag, pp. 107-120. | ![]() |
Bachelor & Master Theses
Fidan, Rifki (2011), "Ausarbeitung und Beschreibung eines Beispielszenarios für die rollenbasierte Darstellung von Prozessinformationen entlang eines konkreten Elektrik-/Elektronik Entwicklungsprozesses", Bachelor thesis, University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten
Schöndorf, Jennifer (2011), "Analyse, Vergleich und Bewertung aktueller Webtechnologien zur User Interface Gestaltung", Bachelor thesis, University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten