In this paper, we report our experience with several LLMs for their ability to understand a process model in an interactive, conversational style, find syntactical and logical errors in it, and reason with it in depth through a natural language (NL) interface. Our findings show that a vanilla, untrained LLM like ChatGPT (model o3) in a zero-shot setting is effective in understanding BPMN process models from images and answering queries about them intelligently at syntactic, logic, and semantic levels of depth. Further, different LLMs vary in performance in terms of their accuracy and effectiveness. Nevertheless, our empirical analysis shows that LLMs can play a valuable role as assistants for business process designers and users. We also study the LLM's "thought process" and ability to perform deeper reasoning in the context of process analysis and optimization. We find that the LLMs seem to exhibit anthropomorphic properties.

Sensitive attributes like gender or age can lead to unfair predictions in machine learning tasks such as predictive business process monitoring, particularly when used without considering context. We present FairLoop1, a tool for human-guided bias mitigation in neural network-based prediction models. FairLoop distills decision trees from neural networks, allowing users to inspect and modify unfair decision logic, which is then used to fine-tune the original model towards fairer predictions. Compared to other approaches to fairness, FairLoop enables context-aware bias removal through human involvement, addressing the influence of sensitive attributes selectively rather than excluding them uniformly.

With the rise of generative AI, industry interest in software agents is growing. Given the stochastic nature of generative AI-based agents, their effective and safe deployment in organizations requires robust governance, which can be facilitated by agentic business process management. However, given the nascence of this new-generation agent notion, it is not clear what BPM practitioners consider to be an agent, and what benefits, risks and governance challenges they associate with agent deployments. To investigate how organizations can effectively govern AI agents, we conducted a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with 22 BPM practitioners from diverse industries. They anticipate that agents will enhance efficiency, improve data quality, ensure better compliance, and boost scalability through automation, while also cautioning against risks such as bias, over-reliance, cybersecurity threats, job displacement, and ambiguous decision-making. To address these challenges, the study presents six key recommendations for the responsible adoption of AI agents: define clear business goals, set legal and ethical guardrails, establish human-agent collaboration, customize agent behavior, manage risks, and ensure safe integration with fallback options. Additionally, the paper outlines actions to align traditional BPM with agentic AI, including balancing human and agent roles, redefining human involvement, adapting process structures, and introducing performance metrics. These insights provide a practical foundation for integrating AI agents into business processes while preserving oversight, flexibility, and trust.

Business processes are fundamental to organizational operations, yet their optimization remains challenging due to the time-consuming nature of manual process analysis. Our paper harnesses Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate value-added analysis, a qualitative process analysis technique that aims to identify steps in the process that do not deliver value. To date, this technique is predominantly manual, time-consuming, and subjective. Our method offers a more principled approach which operates in two phases: first, decomposing high-level activities into detailed steps to enable granular analysis, and second, performing a value-added analysis to classify each step according to Lean principles. This approach enables systematic identification of waste while maintaining the semantic understanding necessary for qualitative analysis. We develop our approach using 50 business process models, for which we collect and publish manual ground-truth labels. Our evaluation, comparing zero-shot baselines with more structured prompts reveals (a) a consistent benefit of structured prompting and (b) promising performance for both tasks. We discuss the potential for LLMs to augment human expertise in qualitative process analysis while reducing the time and subjectivity inherent in manual approaches.

We present a novel 5-step framework called Fine-Tuned Offline Reinforcement Learning Augmented Process Sequence Optimization (FORLAPS), which aims to identify optimal execution paths in business processes using reinforcement learning. We implemented this approach on real-life event logs from our case study an energy regulator in Canada and other real-life event logs, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed method. Additionally, to compare FORLAPS with the existing models (Permutation Feature Importance and multi-task LSTM-Based model), we experimented to evaluate its effectiveness in terms of resource savings and process time span reduction. The experimental results on real-life event log validate that FORLAPS achieves 31% savings in resource time spent and a 23% reduction in process time span. Using this innovative data augmentation technique, we propose a fine-tuned reinforcement learning approach that aims to automatically fine-tune the model by selectively increasing the average estimated Q-value in the sampled batches. The results show that we obtained a 44% performance improvement compared to the pre-trained model. This study introduces an innovative evaluation model, benchmarking its performance against earlier works using nine publicly available datasets. Robustness is ensured through experiments utilizing the Damerau-Levenshtein distance as the primary metric. In addition, we discussed the suitability of datasets, taking into account their inherent properties, to evaluate the performance of different models. The proposed model, FORLAPS, demonstrated exceptional performance, outperforming existing state-of-the-art approaches in suggesting the most optimal policies or predicting the best next activities within a process trace.

Purpose- The significance of business processes has fostered a close collaboration between academia and industry. Moreover, the business landscape has witnessed continuous transformation, closely intertwined with technological advancements. Our main goal is to offer researchers and process analysts insights into the latest developments concerning Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to optimize their processes in an organization and identify research gaps and future directions in the field. Design/methodology/approach- In this study, we perform a systematic review of academic literature to investigate the integration of AI/ML in business process management (BPM). We categorize the literature according to the BPM life-cycle and employ bibliometric and objective-oriented methodology, to analyze related papers. Findings- In business process management and process map, AI/ML has made significant improvements using operational data on process metrics. These developments involve two distinct stages: (1) process enhancement, which emphasizes analyzing process information and adding descriptions to process models, and (2) process improvement, which focuses on redesigning processes based on insights derived from analysis. Research limitations/implications- While this review paper serves to provide an overview of different approaches for addressing process-related challenges, it does not delve deeply into the intricacies of fine-grained technical details of each method. This work focuses on recent papers conducted between 2010 and 2024. Originality/value- This paper adopts a pioneering approach by conducting an extensive examination of the integration of AI/ML techniques across the entire process management lifecycle. Additionally, it presents groundbreaking research and introduces AI/ML-enabled integrated tools, further enhancing the insights for future research.

The widely adopted Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a cornerstone of industry standards for business process modeling. However, its ambiguous execution semantics often result in inconsistent interpretations, depending on the software used for implementation. In response, the Process Specification Language (PASS) provides formally defined semantics to overcome these interpretational challenges. Despite its clear advantages, PASS has not reached the same level of industry penetration as BPMN. This feasibility study proposes using PASS as an intermediary framework to translate and execute BPMN models. It describes the development of a prototype translator that converts specific BPMN elements into a format compatible with PASS. These models are then transformed into source code and executed in a bespoke workflow environment, marking a departure from traditional BPMN implementations. Our findings suggest that integrating PASS enhances compatibility across different modeling and execution tools and offers a more robust methodology for implementing business processes across organizations. This study lays the groundwork for more accurate and unified business process model executions, potentially transforming industry standards for process modeling and execution.

The rapid development of cutting-edge technologies, the increasing volume of data and also the availability and processability of new types of data sources has led to a paradigm shift in data-based management and decision-making. Since business processes are at the core of organizational work, these developments heavily impact business process management (BPM) as a crucial success factor for organizations. In view of this emerging potential, data-driven business process management has become a relevant and vibrant research area. Given the complexity and interdisciplinarity of the research field, this position paper therefore presents research insights regarding data-driven BPM.

In IoT environments, large amounts of procedural data are generated from IoT devices, information systems, and other software applications. The use of this data can foster the development of innovative applications in process control [63, 75, 56, 54, 35, 52, 42, 68], process conformance checking [23, 81, 83, 28], and process enhancement [67, 59], among others. Particularly, the use of process mining techniques to analyze not only process data but also IoT-collected data could provide important insights into processes and interactions as shown in different applications in the manufacturing domain, such as [58, 75, 56, 59, 67]. In these applications, IoT actuators are used to realize and execute process activities, while IoT sensors and smart tags are used to closely monitor the execution environment and involved resources [79, 75, 26, 37, 54]. IoT technology can therefore capture the context in which certain process tasks are performed, allowing process mining techniques to better understand and analyze the processes [7, 76, 12]. As such, besides the procedural data generated from the process execution systems, the data captured by IoT should also be considered an integral part of the process execution in the form of IoT-enriched event logs [57, 53]. Both the procedural nature of sensor logs, and the tight integration of these with the process executions and the executing resources [24] makes sensor data an integral part of process-based application scenarios in IoT [76, 75, 7]. However, the integration of IoT data and process data to be used for process mining is still often done ex-post in a manual fashion during a separate pre-processing phase [95, 73, 53]. In these cases, the data from the IoT environment is still collected and stored separately, and only later it is explicitly connected to the notion of a process, which is non-trivial as pointed out in the challenge "Bridging the Gap Between Event-based and Process-based Systems" in the BPM-IoT manifesto [37].

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has gained widespread adoption in corporate organizations, streamlining work processes while also introducing additional maintenance tasks. Effective governance of RPA can be achieved through the reusability of RPA components. However, refactoring RPA processes poses challenges when dealing with larger development teams, outsourcing, and staff turnover. This research aims to explore the possibility of identifying similarities in RPA processes for refactoring. To address this issue, we have developed Similarity Discovering Techniques for RPA (SiDiTeR). SiDiTeR utilizes source code or process logs from RPAautomations to search for similar or identical parts within RPA processes. The techniques introduced are specifically tailored to the RPA domain. We have expanded the potential matches by introducing a dictionary feature which helps identify different activities that produce the same output, and this has led to improved results in the RPA domain. Through our analysis, we have discovered 655 matches across 156 processes, with the longest match spanning 163 occurrences in 15 processes. Process similarity within the RPA domain proves to be a viable solution for mitigating the maintenance burden associated with RPA. This underscores the significance of process similarity in the RPA domain.