Theses

Topics

Below you will find the subject areas and specific problem statements for which you can write Bachelor's or Master's theses with our department.

General topics for which we conduct thesis work include:

• Intelligent Automation / Hyperautomation
• Business Process Simulation (BPS)
• Sustainability in BPM
• Resource Allocation in Business Processes
• Explaining Activity Dependencies.
   

Concrete Topic Suggestions

Bachelor Thesis Topics

Leveraging Process Engines for Business Process Sustainability Analyses

The enactment of business processes can have a negative impact on the environment, meaning that environmental impacts of business processes need to be analysed. One existing framework, the SOPA framework, uses lifecycle assessments (LCA) to incorporate this impact. However, the analyses happen on a level that abstracts from real-world process executions. During run-time, process engines used to execute processes can be used to a) track run-time data and b) require user input on certain activities so that the environmental impact analyses can be made more exact. Relevant for this is an understanding of the base units used in LCA, which can be used for refinement of the analyses.
Goal: Extend a business process engine so that additional data relevant for environmental impact analyses can be put in/tracked during execution time. Evaluate this with an example.
 

Analysis and categorization of existing public event logs

Event logs capture the actual workflows within a company, identifying deviations, recognizing bottlenecks, and pinpointing inefficient activities. As an objective data source, they are often used for evaluating proposed approaches and ideas within the community. They enable scientists and practitioners to empirically study business processes, develop new models, and suggest improvements. However, a problem arises as event logs are often distributed across various websites and formats, lacking a central overview. Finding the appropriate dataset for a specific analysis or evaluation in business process management is time-consuming and challenging.
Objective/Task: Compile an overview of available data in the BPM area and explain which datasets suit the different application areas. Find an appropriate grouping that maps process datasets to BPM-related research questions.
 

Case Study: Documentation of a Knowledge-Intensive Process

To test and experiment with ideas and newly developed approaches in the BPM area, we need real-use case scenarios that illustrate challenges and allow the testing of developed techniques. This thesis focuses on documenting a business process, with the domain being freely chosen. In addition to creating a process model, the focus is on defining dependencies between activities and the contextual influence on the process. Furthermore, an extended event log will be generated, e.g., through simulation of the process model, containing attributes that capture the contextual information.
Objective/Task: Provide a use case where all activity dependencies are specified and the contextual influence is clearly defined. A process model should be designed, and an event log generated.
 

Comparing Environmental Impacts of Supply Processes

Traditional vendors rely on intermediate distributors to sell and ship their products to customers, storing their goods in warehouses and using traditional shipping routes In contrast to this, emerging online retailers (such as Temu or Aliexpress) allow shipping goods directly to customers, usually via airplane to shorten delivery times. However, one major risk is that customs withholds or rejects these goods, either due to faulty customs declarations or missing certificates. The major question to be addressed in this thesis is in how far the environmental impact of the two types of supply process differs.
Goal: Model the two supply process variants; analyse and compare their environmental impact using life cycle assessment (LCA) and the SOPA framework for sustainability-oriented process analysis. Make justified assumptions, where necessary
 

Bachelor or Master Thesis Topics

Proactive Human Interfaces for Intelligent Process Automation

Business process engines that are augmented by AI promise highly autonomous process orchestration. However, human process participants are still integral to the processes executed. Consequently, the human-machine interface must include functionalities for the system to proactively contact human actors, e.g., to ask for recontextualization, to escalate decisions in unknown situations, or to create awareness of abnormal situations.
Goal: Identify requirements for the human interface of intelligent process automation systems. Conceptualize how these requirements can be implemented and create a prototype.
 

Model-driven Multi-Source Discovery of Simulation Models

Business process simulation is a key method for predictive process improvement. The more precise a simulation model reflects (potential) reality, the more valuable insights can be derived from it. To this end, information from multiple sources, such as process mining tools, databases, and human knowledge must be considered. This presents a challenge to simulation experts, who then need to manually integrate different tools and their data formats. Visual models promise to make simulation model discovery pipelines tangible and automatable, addressing this challenge.
Goal: Develop a user-friendly mechanism to generalize the integration of different tools for the discovery and parameterization of business process simulation models. Evaluate the developed artifact.
 

Extracting Domain Knowledge using Questionnaires

Process models are very useful artifacts for describing the control flow of activities and the execution sequence. However, domain knowledge that also encompasses the backgrounds of relations and the motivation behind why activities are part of the process is usually not represented. This knowledge remains with the process participants. One technique to access this knowledge is through questionnaires. Here, process participants must participate in a kind of survey that systematically queries knowledge. Ideally, the responses can then be evaluated automatically. This thesis aims to apply this technique to a use case scenario. The specific use case can be freely chosen.
Goal: Apply the questionnaire technique to a use case.
 

Incorporating Uncertainty in Process-based Environmental Impact Assessments

When analysing the environmental impact of business processes, existing works assign discrete environmental costs to activity instances of that processes, and thereby arrive at the overall assessment of environmental process costs. However, determining the costs of activity instances is very complex and difficult to confirm, and therefore connected with a degree of uncertainty. Some techniques for quantifying environmental impacts, such as life cycle assessment (LCA) explicitly include this uncertainty in their results. This information on uncertainty could be useful in enriching existing approaches with details on how certain the assessment of environmental process costs is.
Goal: Develop an approach that takes information on uncertainty into account when calculating environmental process costs, and integrate this into the existing implementation of the SOPA framework for sustainability-oriented process analysis.
 

Master Thesis Topics

A Comparison of Modeling Approaches in Context of Behavioral Business Process Redesign

Changes are omnipresent in todays world. Regulations and laws change as well as IT technologies. In order to keep pace with these changes, business processes must also be constantly modified. Business process redesign is the sub-discipline of business process management (BPM) that deals with changing business processes with the aim of making the process more efficient or implementing changes in regulations or technologies at the process level. Process models, especially BPMN process models, are used in particular for changes to process behavior, i.e. changing activity relationships. BPMN is a modeling language that is particularly suitable for static and highly structured processes. Modeling languages such as DECLARE or DCR notations are used for modeling more knowledge-intensive and flexible processes. However, every process model abstracts from the activity relationships that exist in the model making business process redesign challenging for the user. Because so far, changes are mostly done manually. The question now is to what extent the various modeling approaches are suitable for carrying out behavioral business process redesign. Specifically, this thesis will compare modeling approaches and test the manual implementation of concrete change operations on different models in order to have an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches in context of business process redesign.
Goal: Provide an overview of strengths and weaknesses of modeling approaches for a set of change operations that are performed on process models created with these notations. In particular, compare BPMN, DECLARE, DCR, CMMN, and a new approach focusing on temporal and existential dependencies.