WST-Talk von Prof. Paul Grefen
07.05.2019, 10:00
SR4 | Währinger Straße 29, 1090 Wien

Abstract:
In the modern economy, we see complex business processes with a physical character that are executed collaboratively by a set of autonomous business organizations. Examples are international container logistics, integrated supply and manufacturing networks, and collaborative healthcare chains - all of which handle physical objects. Over time, these processes have become more complex, more business-critical, more time-critical, and at the same time heavily mass-customized. This implies that the processes need to be managed more explicitly in an increasingly real-time fashion, with ample attention to individual process cases and the physical objects they are related to. This requires advanced digital support, creating complex, cyber-physical processes. To support this kind of processes, no single existing technology class suffices. Therefore, we propose to integrate technologies from the areas of the internet of things (IoT - to sense and actuate the physical objects), distributed analytics (DA - to take the right decisions at the right place in real-time) and business process management (BPM - to explicitly manage the execution of the processes), and into a technology trinity. This presentation outlines the problem domain, the approach taken towards a solution, and the concrete steps that are taken to operationalize the solution approach – using distributed edge systems, federated learning and inference, and process management technology. This is illustrated with an example from the domain of international container logistics. The work is a currently running collaboration between IBM Almaden Research Center (CA, USA) and Eindhoven University of Technology (NL).

Bio:
Paul Grefen is a full professor in the School of Industrial Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) since 2003. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Twente on parallel management of main-memory databases. He was a visiting researcher at Stanford University in 1994. As a researcher and a manager, he has been involved in various European research projects as well as various projects within the Netherlands. He is an editor and author of the books on the WIDE and CrossWork projects, and has authored books on workflow management, electronic business and service-dominant business engineering. His current research covers architectural design of business information systems, inter-organizational business process management, service-dominant business design and support, and cyber-physical business systems. He has realized about 300 scientific publications. He teaches at the BSc, MSc and PhD levels at TU/e and at the executive level for TIAS business school.