M.: Automatically Generating and Updating User Interface Components in Process-Aware Information Systems

Abstract. The increasing adoption of process-aware information sys-tems (PAISs) has resulted in a large number of implemented business processes. To react on changing needs, companies need to be able to quickly adapt these process implementations. Current PAISs only pro-vide mechanisms to evolve the schema of a process, but do not allow for support the automated creation and adaptation of user interfaces (UIs). The latter may have a complex logic and comprise conditional elements or database queries. Creating and evolving UIs manually is a tedious and error-prone task. This paper introduces a set of patterns for transform-ing fragments of a business process, whose activities are performed by the same user role, to UIs of the PAIS. In particular, UI logic can be ex-pressed using the same notation as for process modeling. Furthermore, a transformation method is introduced, which applies these patterns to au-tomatically derive UIs by establishing a bidirectional mapping between process model and UI. This mapping allows propagating UI changes to the process model and vice versa. Overall, our approach enables process designers to rapidly develop and update complex UIs in PAISs.