Modeling and executing batch activities in business processes Business process automation improves organizations’ efficiency to perform work. Therefore a business process is first documented as a process model which then serves as blueprint for a number of process instances representing the execution of specific business cases. In existing business process management systems process instances run independently from each other. However in practice instances are also collected in groups at certain process activities for a combined execution to improve the process performance. Currently this so called batch processing is executed manually or supported by external software. Only few research proposals exist to explicitly represent and execute batch processing needs in business process models. These works also lack a comprehensive understanding of requirements. This thesis addresses the described issues by providing a basic concept called batch activity. It allows an explicit representation of batch processing configurations in process models and provides a corresponding execution […]