Modeling business processes for automated crisis management support: Lessons learned

Process-aware information systems (PAIS) supporting knowledge-intensive processes are gaining importance nowadays. Crisis management process is an example of a knowledge-intensive process that is grounded on vast experience of multiple actors (e.g., city services, volunteers, administration) and their collaboration. Automated crisis management systems have to comply with various norms and regulations; at the same time, they need to constantly deal with uncertainty and adapt the process scenario to a current situation. In this paper, we consider the example of a flood management process implemented as a part of the COS Operation Center (COSOC) - a smart city solution that works with knowledge-intensive processes. We examine how the activity-oriented modeling paradigm underlying COSOC supports process flexibility. We propose an alternative way to specify the flood management process based on state-oriented paradigm and the statecharts formalism and discuss the advantages and limitations of the two paradigms.