Researcher profile

I am an active researcher within the Business Process Management (BPM) research cluster in Faculty of Information Technology. I have completed my PhD studies in the area of workflows with cancellation regions and OR-joins in Nov 2006. I am now working as a postdoctoral research fellow in an ARC-Discovery research project (2007 - 2009) with Professor Colin Fidge, Assoc. Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede and Assoc. Prof. Marlon Dumas. The research project focuses on applying BPM simulation techniques to locate items in distribution networks. I am also the recepient of the Vice-Chancellor's Performance Award for excellence in early career research in 2007.

Please go to the Publications page for a list of my publications. Some of my publications (full-text) are also available from QUT e-prints archive. Some citations to my work can be found on Google Scholar.

Research interests

• Business process modelling
• Business Process automation
• Business process analysis
• Business process simulation
• Process validation and verification
• Process monitoring
• Process mining
• Web services and service oriented architectures
• Workflow patterns
• Petri nets and Reset nets
• Yet Another Workflow Language

PhD research

My PhD research was carried out under the guidance of Dr. David Edmond, Assoc. Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede and Professor Wil van der Aalst.

More information regarding the OR-join semantics and verification for YAWL can be found on the YAWL foundation website.

Research projects

YAWL

I am closely involved in the YAWL initiative headed by Associate Professor Arthur ter Hofstede and Professor Wil van der Aalst. The YAWL initiative reflects a long-running collaborative research effort between Eindhoven University of Technology and the BPM group. The work is the result of earlier research collaborations on the workflow patterns where the control flow requirements of commercial workflow systems are studied in detail (http://www.workflowpatterns.com).

The finding from my PhD research directly influences the semantics of the YAWL language.

• After careful analysis, I proposed a new formal semantics for the OR-join construct in the YAWL language together with an algorithmic approach. My finding on the OR-join semantics represents a substantial contribution to the field. I also implemented the algorithm and integrated it within the YAWL workflow engine (version beta 4 onwards).

• My other significant contribution to the YAWL initiative is the proposal of new analysis techniques for YAWL workflows. The benefits include improved quality for workflows as well as significant time and cost savings due to detecting errors in advance. I have implemented this approach and integrated the code within the YAWL editor (version 1.3 onwards).

• My third technical contribution is in the area of reduction rules. The proposed reduction rules for reset nets represent a contribution to the body of theory on reset nets. Moreover, YAWL reduction rules assist in managing the complexity associated with the verification of YAWL workflows. I have incorporated the support for both types of reduction rules into the verification functionality of the YAWL editor.

BPM simulation

I am carrying out research in the area of BPM simulation as part of an ARC-Discovery project. We are interested in systematically identifying the control, the data and the resource requirements for business process simulation. This also presents collaborative efforts with researchers and students from the Eindhoven University of Technology and Macau University.

We are also currently investigating how the current state data and historical data from workflow system logs could be used to enrich the input modelling aspect of a simulation study. To showcase how real-time data from the workflow system can be utilised in simulation experiments, we have developed a software that makes a link between the YAWL workflow system and the Process Mining framework (ProM). Our publications on this topic can be found on my publications page. A tutorial on how to use this feature can be found on ProM wiki.

I am committed to applying theoretical research findings to develop practical solutions for real-world problems through collaboration with industry partners and other well-known researchers in my area of expertise.