Information Systems

Professur in Heilbronn

Information systems and new technologies (such as artificial intelligence or RPA) are increasingly becoming essential for companies and organizations that do not offer IT products and services to survive in today's markets. On the one hand, information systems and new technologies help companies to design their business processes effectively and efficiently. On the other hand, they can open up new business models and markets.

The Information Systems Chair at the TUM Campus Heilbronn, with its focus on Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Architecture (EA), researches and teaches at the interface between management and technology. The chair focuses on methods, concepts, and techniques for successfully using information systems and technologies in business processes, developing new business areas, and designing such systems and technologies. The chair uses knowledge from EA, which offers analytical methods for integrating business strategy, corporate structure, and IT, and BPM, which provides methods, concepts, techniques, and systems for stable, efficient, and adaptable business processes.

Focus Areas

• Business process management & case management (management of knowledge-intensive processes)
• Process mining
• Compliance and sustainability in business processes
• Process execution systems

Projects

DFG Project Combining Process Mining and Reference Models for Improving Daily Practices and Regulations – Conformance Checking with Reference Models (CheR)
(In collaboration with university of Mannheim)

Business processes often have to follow specific prescribed regulations, such as clinical practice guidelines in healthcare, laws and statutes in public administration, or the new hygiene rules in many different domains. For both organizational success and official audits, it is essential to know: Are we following the prescribed regulations? If we deviate, why? Should we improve employees’ training? Could the rules be adapted to be better applicable in the real world?
The CheR project combines, for the first time, techniques from reference modelling and conformance checking to compare real-life process behavior with prescribed regulations. The goal is to find and visualize the deviations between them to allow tailored training for employees, preparation of audits, or suggestions for improving either the process or the regulations in the respective domains. Several open aspects need to be targeted to allow conformance checking with reference models, including (1) supporting (semi)-automatic generation of reference models, (2) the extraction of useful event logs for this type of process mining project, (3) benchmarking of existing conformance checking methods and their possible extension, and (4) an empirical evaluation on how the CheR approach allows to leverage conformance checking with regulations, e.g., for training employees.

Automotive Initiative 25 – Process Mining Readiness
(In collaboration with Audi and the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering)

Process Mining is a data-driven approach to the analysis and optimization of business processes, used to facilitate the efficiency, resilience, and sustainability of industries. However, good data quality and an appropriete ecosystem are needed to apply Process Mining. In the "Proces Mining Readiness" cluster of the Automotive Initiative 2025 , we derive preconditions and requirements for an application of Process Mining at Audi, using an example process from production and logistics. Our goal is to derive an initial plan of action and recommendations for data acquisition and usage. For this, we place special attention on data availability and quality.

Publications

Last 5 publications of the team:

• Andree, Kerstin, Mai Hoang, Felix Dannenberg, Ingo Weber, and Luise Pufahl. Discovery of Workflow Patterns-A Comparison of Process Discovery Algorithms. In International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, pp. 257-274. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2023.
• Bein, L., Klessascheck, F., Nepeina, S., Warmuth, C., Kampik, T., & Pufahl, L. (2023). SimuBridge: Discovery and Management of Process Simulation Scenarios. In Demonstration & Resources Track at BPM 2023, Utrecht, Netherlands.
• Andree, K., Bano, D., & Weske, M. (2023, May). Beyond Temporal Dependency: An Ontology-Based Approach to Modeling Causal Structures in Business Processes. In International Conference on Business Process Modeling, Development and Support (pp. 152-166). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
• Rehse, J. R., Pufahl, L., Grohs, M., & Klein, L. M. (2023). Process Mining Meets Visual Analytics: The Case of Conformance Checking. In Proceedings of 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 5452) ScholarSpace.
• Cremerius, J., Pufahl, L., Klessascheck, F., & Weske, M. (2023, March). Event Log Generation in MIMIC-IV Research Paper. In Process Mining Workshops: ICPM 2022 International Workshops, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, October 23–28, 2022, Revised Selected Papers (pp. 302-314). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

10 most important publications of the team:

• Pufahl, L., Zerbato, F., Weber, B., & Weber, I. (2022). BPMN in healthcare: Challenges and best practices. Information Systems, 107, 102013.
• Moyano, C. G., Pufahl, L., Weber, I., & Mendling, J. (2022). Uses of business process modeling in agile software development projects. Information and Software Technology, 107028.
• Andree, K., Ihde, S., Weske, M., & Pufahl, L. (2022). An exception handling framework for case management. Software and Systems Modeling, 21(3), 939-962.
• Ihde, S., Pufahl, L., Völker, M., Goel, A., & Weske, M. (2022). A framework for modeling and executing task-Specific resource allocations in business processes. Computing, 104(11), 2405-2429.
• Klessascheck, F. (2022). Towards a Framework for Business Process Sustainability Analysis, 4th ZEUS Workshop, ZEUS 2022, Bamberg
• Klessascheck, F., Lichtenstein, T., Meier, M., Remy, S., Sachs, J. P., Pufahl, L., ... & Weske, M. (2021, July). Domain-specific event abstraction. In Business Information Systems (pp. 117-126).
• Martin, N., Pufahl, L., & Mannhardt, F. (2021). Detection of batch activities from event logs. Information Systems, 95, 101642.
• König, M., Bein, L., Nikaj, A., & Weske, M. (2020). Integrating robotic process automation into business process management. In Business Process Management: Blockchain and Robotic Process Automation Forum: BPM 2020 Blockchain and RPA Forum, Seville, Spain, September 13–18, 2020, Proceedings 18 (pp. 132-146). Springer International Publishing.
• Remy, S., Pufahl, L., Sachs, J. P., Böttinger, E., & Weske, M. (2020). Event log generation in a health system: a case study. In Business Process Management: 18th International Conference, BPM 2020, Seville, Spain, September 13–18, 2020, Proceedings 18 (pp. 505-522). Springer International Publishing.
• Pufahl, L., Wong, T. Y., & Weske, M. (2018). Design of an extensible BPMN process simulator. In Business Process Management Workshops: BPM 2017 International Workshops, Barcelona, Spain, September 10-11, 2017, Revised Papers 15 (pp. 782-795). Springer International Publishing.

A combined and up-to-date publication list of the team can be found here: Google Scholar

Theses

If you are interested in writing a thesis with us, please click here.