2010 - ERCIS

Joint Project
Seminar Slipstream
The project seminar Slipstream was
conducted by the European Research
Center for Information Systems at the
University of Münster in cooperation
with SAP Research Brisbane. The project
was comprised of seven IS Master
students. During the project, the
students worked self-responsibly and
self-organized in their team. Weekly
meetings with local advisors from
the Information Systems department
as well as biweekly conference calls
with SAP Research Brisbane complemented
the usual communication to
coordinate the cooperation and debate
issues, results, and goals of the
project.
The goal of the project Slipstream
was the development of a real-time,
pro-active Business Activity Management
(BAM) solution. Current
Business Activity
Monitoring solutions
suffer from a number
of drawbacks: there is
a considerable time
lag between the occurrence
and the observation
of critical
events, the integration
with Business
Process Management
(BPM) engines is often
hard-wired, and
most solutions focus
on passive monitoring
of business
processes without
allowance for proactive
intervention
of running process
instances. Applying
the concept of Complex
Event Processing
(CEP) to BAM seems
to be a promising way
to tackle these issues.
CEP, in general,
comprises a set of
techniques for mak-
Joint Project Seminar “Slipstream”
ing sense of events in a system by
deriving higher-level knowledge from
lower-level system events in a timely
and online fashion. A CEP system acts
as a parallel running platform that defines,
analyses, processes, and acts
upon events produced by another
system. The team had to build their
solution on the basis of SAP standard
software (i.e., SAP Netweaver BPM,
BRM and CE, Aleri Streaming Platform
[recently acquired by SAP in the
course of the Sybase acquisition], and
SAP Business Objects Xcelsius). From
a business perspective, a challenge
to be solved by the seminar was to
elaborate use cases to demonstrate
the features of their solution. These
include event publishing, filtering,
aggregation, analysis, prediction, and
pro-active reaction to events. Therefore,
the team used an example business
process from the field of supply
chain management, namely a perfect
order scenario.
The team fully accomplished all
goals defined by SAP Research and
the ERCIS. On a conceptual level, the
team developed a reference architecture
for the event-driven Business
Activity Management. Furthermore,
the team adapted an existing event
format (i.e., Business Process Analytics
Format, BPAF) to communicate
between the involved systems. The
conceptual design has been fully implemented
using the mentioned software
products. The results currently
serve as a valuable input for the SAP
Netweaver development department
in Walldorf. A transfer of the architecture
to industry is expected to emerge
from cooperation with SAP Research.
Research papers as well as Master
theses are already on their way. Additionally,
the developed prototype has
been presented at the Innovation Lab
of the SAP TechEd 2010 in Berlin (Oct.
12th – 14th).
The team at the Innovation Lab of the SAP TechEd 2010 in Berlin
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