Business process management

In recent years the management of business processes has emerged as one of the major developments to ease the understanding of, communication about, and evolution of process-oriented information systems in a variety of appli- tion domains. Based on explicit representations of business processes, process stakeholders can communicate about process structure, content, and possible improvements. Formal analysis, veri? cation and simulation techniques have the potential to show de? cits and to e? ectively lead to better and more ? exible processes. Process mining facilitates the discovery of process speci? cations from process logs that are readily available in many organizations. This volume of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science contains the papers presented at the 2nd International Conference on Business Process M- agement (BPM 2004) which took place in Potsdam, Germany, in June 2004. From more than 70 submissions BPM 2004 received, 19 high-quality research papers were selected. BPM 2004 is part of a conference series that provides a forum for researchers and practitioners in all aspects of business process management. In June 2003, the 1st International Conference on Business Process Management took place in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Its proceedings were published as Volume 2678 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science by Springer-Verlag. A previous volume (LNCS1806)onBusinessProcessManagementwasbasedonfoureventsdevoted to this topic.