Sustainability research at our chair

In light of the environmental impacts of human behaviour generally and of organizations and their business processes in particular, it becomes increasingly important to empower organizations to measure and improve the environmental impacts of their processes. Therefore, a particular avenue of research we are pursuing lies in the integration of sustainability into the discipline of Business Process Management. In the following, we present the main contributions to this that our group has made.

SOPA Framework

In a publication in the Information Systems and e-Business Management journal, we present SOPA, a framework for ‘sustainability-oriented process analysis and re-design in business process management’. The main idea is to use Lifecycle Assessment (LCA), a technique from product design, to holistically quantify environmental costs of entities involved in process execution (i.e. considering all possible dimensions of environmental costs instead of limiting the perspective to a few key indicators such as CO₂ emissions), and thus to be able to determine the total environmental costs of activity and process execution. With the help of process simulation, it is possible to analyze process redesigns for their savings potential in terms of environmental costs and, if necessary, develop new redesigns. In particular, questions such as ‘What impact does it have on environmental costs to make process executions with high environmental costs less likely if I have to accept high costs elsewhere as a result?’ can be answered in a data-driven way.

We have also integrated the abstract formal framework, for which we offer a prototype implementation in the article, into SimuBridge, a software solution that enables the creation and management of process simulation scenarios, and presented it at the International Conference on Process Mining 2024. We are continuously working on this user-friendly implementation of SOPA to increase its usability in companies and to improve the accuracy of the analyses that are currently possible with SOPA.

EU Taxonomy for sustainable economic activities

In addition, we have addressed the EU Taxonomy for Sustainable Economic Activities in various publications as a set of rules that describes when business practices can be considered sustainable. In a conference paper at the International Conference on Enterprise Design, Operations, and Computing 2024, we examine the extent to which the EU Taxonomy offers rules that can be applied to business processes in a data-driven manner using process mining techniques. With this application, it would be possible to determine at runtime the extent to which processes comply with the relevant requirements of the EU Taxonomy, i.e., whether they can be considered sustainable. In a follow-up conference paper at the International Conference on Enterprise Design, Operations, and Computing 2025, we illustrate how BPM techniques can generally be used to verify and comply with rules from the EU taxonomy. A conceptual model that we present there shows how BPM practices and the EU Taxonomy are related, and how BPM techniques can therefore be used for the EU Taxonomy.