Decision-aware information systems: a systems modelling perspective bridging decisions and processes.

Modern process-aware information systems heavily rely on decision knowledge for the development, execution, and evolution of operational processes. This decision knowledge drives process engineering, execution, and automation and impacts multiple process perspectives, such as the control flow, data, and resource perspectives. Therefore, a consistent integration of decisions and processes is imperative for a sound development and management of knowledge-based processes. This thesis presents advances in the field of process-aware information systems by augmenting the processes with a model-driven decision perspective. The contributions are divided into three parts. The first part presents the integration of processes and decisions from a modelling viewpoint. By detecting inconsistencies in the integration of the models, principles and guidelines are proposed to ensure a consistent integration when modelling decision-aware processes or re-engineering processes for decision-awareness. The second part capitalises on design principles from the service-oriented architecture paradigm to systematically address the separation of concerns between the process and decision perspectives, as well as their consistent integration. A layered reference design that takes these design principles into account is contributed and illustrated through decision-aware process discovery on a real-life enriched event log. Finally, in the third part, change patterns for decision-aware processes are introduced, as well as prototype modelling tools that support the evolution of process and decision models through the change patterns. The tools comprise a modelling environment with built-in consistency verification capabilities, automated feedback, and user-driven automated mechanisms for restoring both within-model and between-model consistency. In summary, this dissertation introduces a systems modelling perspective of decisions to process-aware information systems, thus rendering decision-aware processes. By doing so, it recognises the importance of decision models in model-driven software systems engineering.status: publishe