Making work flow: on the application of Petri nets to business process management

Information technology has changed business processes within and between enterprises. More and more work processes are being conducted under the supervision of information systems that are driven by process models. Examples are workflow management systems such as Staffware, enterprise resource planning systems such as SAP and Baan, but also include many domain specific systems. It is hard to imagine enterprise information systems that are unaware of the processes taking place. Although the topic of business process management using information technology has been addressed by consultants and software developers in depth, a more fundamental approach has been missing. Only since the nineties, researchers started to work on the foundations of business process management systems. This paper addresses some of the scientific challenges in business process management. In the spirit of Hilbert’s problems1, 10 interesting problems for people working on Petri-net theory are posed. Part of paper is taken from my inaugural lecture "Making Work Flow: On the Design, Analysis, and Enactment of Business Processes" [6]. Note that by no means we are suggesting that the problems in this paper are of the same stature as the 23p roblems raised by David Hilbert in 1900.