Business process management

In recent years, managing business processes has become a significant development for understanding, communicating, and evolving process-oriented information systems across various application domains. Explicit representations of business processes enable stakeholders to discuss structure, content, and improvements. Techniques for formal analysis, verification, and simulation can identify deficiencies, leading to enhanced and more flexible processes. Process mining aids in discovering process specifications from logs commonly found in organizations. This volume of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science features papers from the 2nd International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2004), held in Potsdam, Germany, in June 2004. Out of over 70 submissions, 19 high-quality research papers were selected. BPM 2004 is part of a conference series that serves as a platform for researchers and practitioners in all facets of business process management. The inaugural conference took place in June 2003 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, with its proceedings published as Volume 2678 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science by Springer-Verlag. A previous volume (LNCS1806) focused on four events dedicated to this topic.