# About SIMPDA #
With the increasing automation of business processes, growing amounts of process data become available. This opens new research opportunities for business process data analysis, mining and modeling. The aim of the IFIP 2.6 - 2.12 International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis is to offer a forum where researchers from different communities and the industry can share their insight in this hot new field.
The Symposium will feature a number of keynotes illustrating advanced approaches, shorter presentations on recent research, a competitive PhD seminar and selected research and industrial demonstrations. This year the symposium will be held in Milan, the city of Expo 2015.

# Call for Papers #

The IFIP International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis (SIMPDA 2013) offers a unique opportunity to present new approaches and research results to researchers and practitioners working in business process data modeling, representation and privacy-aware analysis.
The symposium will bring together leading researchers, engineers and scientists from around the world. Full papers must not exceed 15 pages. Short papers are limited to at most 4 pages. All papers must be original contributions, not previously published or under review for publication elsewhere. All contributions must be written in English and must follow the LNCS Springer Verlag format. Templates can be downloaded from: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

Accepted papers will be published in a pre-proceeding volume with an ISBN. The authors of the accepted papers will be invited to submit extended articles to a post-symposium proceedings volume hich will be published in the LNBIP series (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, http://www.springer.com/series/7911), scheduled for early 2014 (extended papers length will be between 7000 and 9000 words). Around 10-15 papers will be selected for publication after a second round of review.

# Topics #
Topics of interest for submission include, but are not limited to:
- Business Process modeling languages, notations and methods
- Data-aware and data-centric approaches
- Variability and configuration of process models
- Process Mining with Big Data
- Process simulation and static analyses
- Process data query languages
- Process data mining
- Privacy-aware process data mining
- Process metadata and semantic reasoning
- Process patterns and standards
- Foundations of business process models
- Resource management in business process execution
- Process tracing and monitoring
- Process change management and evolution
- Business process lifecycle
- Case studies and experience reports
- Social process discovery
- Crowdsourced process definition and discovery

– Workshop Format –
In accordance to our historical tradition of proposing SIMPDA as a symposium, we propose an innovative format for this workshop:
The number of sessions depend on the number of submissions but, considering the previous editions, we envisage to have four sessions, with 4-5 related papers assigned to each session. A special session (with a specific review process) will be dedicated to discuss research plan from PhD students.
Papers are pre-circulated to the authors that will be expected to read all papers in advance but to avoid exceptional overhead, two are assigned to be prepared with particular care, making ready comments and suggestions.
The bulk of the time during each session will be dedicated to open conversations about all of the papers in a given session, along with any linkages to the papers and discussions within an earlier session.
The closing session (30 minutes), will include a panel about open challenges during which every participant will be asked to assemble their thoughts/project ideas/goals/etc… that they got out of the workshop.

# Call for PhD Research Plans #

The SIMPDA PhD Seminar is a workshop for Ph.D. students from all over the world. The goal of the Seminar is to help students with their thesis and research plans by providing feedback and general advice on how to use their research results.
Students interested in participating in the Seminar should submit an extended abstract describing their research. Submissions can relate to any aspect of Process Data: technical advances, usage and impact studies, policy analyses, social and institutional implications, theoretical contributions, interaction and design advances, innovative applications, and social implications.
Research plans should be at most of 4 page long and should be organized following the following structure:
Abstract: summarizes, in 5 line, the research aims and significance.
Research Question: defines what will be accomplished by eliciting the relevant the research questions.
Background: defines the background knowledge providing the 5 most relevant references (papers or books).
Significance: explains the relevance of the general topic and of the specific contribution.
Research design and methods: describes and motivates the method adopted focusing on: assumptions, solutions, data sources, validation of results, limitations of the approach.
Research stage: describes what the student has done so far.

- SIMPDA PhD award -
A doctoral award will be given by the SIMPDA PhD Jury to the best research plan submitted.
Student Scholarships
An application for a limited number of scholarships aimed at students coming from emerging countries has been submitted to IFIP.
In order to apply, please contact paolo.ceravolo@unimi.it

# Keynote Speakers #

Jorge Cardoso
University of Coimbra, Portugal

- Compliance of Business Processes with Reference Models -
Reference models provide best practices to design effective and efficient business processes. However, a main challenge is to evaluate how these best practices are implemented. One limitation of existing approaches is the assumption that compliance can be determined using the notion of process equivalence. Nonetheless, the use of equivalence algorithms is not suitable since two models can have different structures but one process can still be compliant with the other. This talk presents an approach to measure the compliance of process models with reference models, which was used by a German passenger airline using IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) reference models. The talk also covers various initiatives to evaluate the quality and understandability of process models.

# Industrial Talks #

Claudia Sebastiani
Creativi Quadrati, Partner openERP

- Business Process Measurement in small enterprises after the installation of an ERP software -
We report the observation of the first six months of operation after the installation of an ERP software in a group of small Italian enterprises (some dealers of various products and one manufacturer). Before the ERP, no explicit process descriptions existed within the companies: the operations were manually performed, using office automation software or legacy programs that were not process oriented. The new ERP is equipped with a workflow engine, a number of standard processes that should be followed by the users, and a tracking system that logs the main steps of the processes. We use process mining tools to analyze the events logged by the ERP during the sales, the purchases and the manufacture cycles. Our aim is to 1) compare the ideal processes suggested by the ERP with the real paths followed by the users 2) describe the eventual adaptation of these paths, as the users became acquainted with the ERP 3) highlight critical segments in terms of time spent, iterations, etc. 4) compare the processes of different companies that are in similar business areas. The final goal is to get a better understanding of the processes and a rationalization of the operations. It must be stressed that both the ERP and the main tools used are open source, so that the process measurement is affordable even for very small (micro) enterprises.

Gregorio Piccoli
Zucchetti

- Hierarchical clustering for managers -
Data Mining and Process Mining over big amount of data are today more and more requested by companies. However managers do not have the necessary competences for handling the results of analysis ran using these techniques. For this reason data visualization is a key element to exploit the full potential of data analysis. Zucchetti spa has developed an in-house approach for constructing user-friendly data visualizers.

Gabriele Ruffati
Engineering Ingegneria Informatica

- A living story: measuring quality of developments in a large industrial software factory with Open Source Software -
Open Source has no more intrinsic value per se. Nowadays it is facing new challenges, such as stimulating creativity and bringing innovation into market. One of its major challenges consists in delivering valuable outcomes, which requires a PMAI approach: Plan metrics and dimensions of analysis, get Measures and global performance value from data, Assess results and Improve processes by solving issues and removing bottlenecks. Engineering Group uses Open Source Software to makes this happen. Spago4Q, the analytic of the business intelligence suite SpagoBI, allows the company to measure the quality of products, processes and services and to monitor the continuous improvement of quality practices. The measurement and enhancement of productivity complies with quality certifications such as ISO and CMMi standards. QESTnd - an n-dimensional measurement model - allows to collect performance values on three dimensions of analysis (Economical, Social and Technical) in order to identify process areas that need improvements. Drill-down capabilities provide both a unified view of the global performance of the Labs and detailed views of the single process dimensions.

# Organizers #

CHAIRS
- Rafael Accorsi, University of Freiburg, Germany
- Paolo Ceravolo, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
- Barbara Russo, Free University of Bozen - Bolzano, Italy

ADVISORY BOARD
- Karl Aberer, EPFL, Switzerland
- Ernesto Damiani, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
- Tharam Dillon, La Trobe University, Australia
- Dragan Gasevic, Athabasca University, Canada
- Erich Neuhold, University of Vienna, Austria
- Maurice van Keulen, University of Twente, The Netherlands
- Philippe Cudré-Mauroux , University of Fribourg, Switzerland

# Important Dates #

- Submission of Full Papers: September 22nd 2014
- Submission of PhD Research Plans: September 22nd 2014
- Notification of Acceptance: October 15th 2014
- Submission of Camera Ready Papers: November 10th 2014

# Program Committee #

- Irene Vanderfeesten, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
- Maurice van Keulen, University of Twente, The Netherlands
- Manfred Reichert, University of Ulm, Germany
- Schahram Dustdar, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
- Mohamed Mosbah, University of Bordeaux, France
- Meiko Jensen, Ruhr-Uni­ver­si­ty Bo­chum, Germany
- Helen Balinsky, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, UK
- Valentina Emilia Balas, University of Arad, Romania
- Karima Boudaoud, Ecole Polytechnique de Nice Sophia Antipolis, France
- George Spanoudakis, City University London, UK
- Richard Chbeir, University of Bourgogne, France
- Gregorio Martinez Perez, University of Murcia, Spain
- Ebrahim Bagheri, Ryerson University, Canada
- Jan Mendling, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
- Farookh Hussain, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
- Marcello Leida, EBTIC (Etisalat BT Innovation Centre), UAE
- Wil Van der Aalst, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands
- Ronald Maier, University of Innsbruck, Austria
- Chintan Amrit, University of Twente, The Netherlands
- Marco Montali, Free Unviersity of Bozen - Bolzano, Italy
- Elizabeth Chang, University New South Wales, Australia
- Peter Spyns, Flemish Government, Belgium
- Angelo Corallo, University of Salento, Italy
- Antonio Maña Gómez, University of Málaga, Spain
- Mustafa Jarrar, Birzeit University, Palestinian Territory
- Isabella Seeber, University of Innsbruck, Austria
- Chi Hung, Tsinghua University, China
- Alessandra Toninelli, Engineering Group, Italy
- Haris Mouratidis, University of Brighton, UK
- Abder Koukam, University of Technology, UTBM France
- Fabrizio Maria Maggi, University of Tartu, Estonia
- Massimiliano De Leoni, Eindhoven TU, Netherlands
- Edgar Weippl, TU Vienna, Austria
- Pnina Soffer, University of Haifa, Israel
- Jianmin Wang, Tsinghua University Beijing, China
- Minseok Song, UNIST, South Korea
- Roland Rieke, Fraunhofer SIT, Germany
- Josep Carmona, UPC - Barcelona, Spain
- Mark Strembeck, WU Vienna, Austria
- Matthias Weidlich, Imperial College, UK
- Mohamed Mosbah, University of Bordeaux
- Maria Leitner, University of Vienna, Austria
- Benoit Depaire, University of Hasselt, Belgium
- Barbara Weber, University of Innsbruck, Austria
- Babiga Birregah, University of Technology of Troyes, France

# Historical Information on Previous Editions #

SIMPDA was proposed in 2011 and 2012 by IFIP WG 2.6 and 2.12/12.4 as the International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis.
The symposium had around 30 attendees in 2011 and 20 in 2012. It featured a number of keynotes illustrating new approaches, shorter presentations on recent research, and a competitive PhD seminar, together with selected research and industrial demonstrations. The authors of the accepted papers have been invited to submit extended articles to a post-symposium proceedings volume published in the Springer LNBIP series.
Several events and activities arose off these symposia, among the most notables we have two Dagstuhl seminars:
Dagstuhl Seminar on Semantic Challenges in Sensor Networks, January 24-29, 2010.
Dagstuhl Seminar on Unleashing Operational Process Mining, November 24-29, 2010.
The venue was for both editions Campione d’Italia, the Italian enclave surrounded by Swiss territory, on the shores of Lake Lugano