Call for Research Papers

The International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM) is the premium forum for researchers and practitioners in the field of BPM. The conference embraces the interdisciplinary nature of BPM to its fullest extent. To this end, the conference explicitly seeks to bring together the finest research contributions and viewpoints from the fields of computer science, information systems engineering, and information system management, insofar as they enhance or refine the existing portfolio of theories, methods and tools for managing and improving business processes.

To accommodate for this diversity, the BPM conference is structured into three tracks: Foundations, Engineering, and Management. Each track covers different phenomena of interest and different research methods and, accordingly, each track has different evalu­ation criteria, a separate track chair and a dedicated program committee.

Track I: Foundations

Track I invites papers that follow computer science research methods. This includes papers that investigate the underlying principles of BPM systems, computational theories, algorithms, semantics, and methods for modeling and analyzing business processes. This track also covers papers on novel languages, architectures, and other con­cepts underlying process aware information systems, as well as papers that use conceptual modeling techniques to investigate problems in the design and analysis of BPM systems. Papers in Track I are evaluated according to computer science standards, including sound formalization, convincing argumentation, and, where applicable, proof of concept implementation, which shows that the concepts can be implemented as described. Since papers are not required to have an immediate application in concrete business environments, empirical evaluation is not required in Track I. Instead, papers will be evaluated on the basis of the soundness of the formalization and the degree to which the developed foundations permits new ways of modelling and/or analyzing BPM systems.

You should send your paper to Track I if:

• It provides foundational results about the underlying principles and concepts of BPM systems.
• It advances the state of the art in BPM through the investigation of formal methods and algorithms.
• It contributes to the definition of novel concepts, languages, and architectures for BPM systems.
• It tackles conceptual modelling issues of BPM systems and their environment.
• It investigates novel concepts of BPM systems through the development of proof-of-concept implementations.

Track Chair: Dirk Fahland

Track II: Engineering

Track II invites papers that focus on engineering aspects of information systems research. The focus is on the investigation of artifacts and systems in business environments. All papers in this track must include strong empirical evaluations that are rigorous and repeatable and that critically test criteria like usefulness or added value of the proposed artifact (for example by showing considerable performance improvements compared to past work). This track covers business process intelligence, including process mining techniques, and the use of process models for enactment, model-driven engineering, as well as interaction with services and deployment architectures like the Cloud. It also covers BPM systems in particular domains, such as digital health, smart mobility, or Internet of Things. Strong empirical evaluations are important to show the merits of the artifact introduced. Where applicable, artifacts should be compared to state-of-the-art in a reproducible manner. Whenever appropriate, artifacts should be evaluated against real and public datasets. When artificial datasets are introduced, clear motivations should be provided together with an assessment of its quality and a discussion of how this impacts the threats to validity. A self-critical discussion of threats to validity is expected. Formalization of problems and solutions should be used where they add clarity or are beneficial in other ways.

You should send your paper to Track II if:

• It has a significant engineering, systems or design contribution.
• Its results are empirically evaluated in a rigorous and preferably reproducible manner, e.g., using public datasets or public Cloud infrastructures.
• It reports on a system that you designed, with a maturity of at least a prototype, i.e., it can be evaluated in an application context.

Track Chair: Chiara Ghidini

Track III: Management

Track III invites papers that aim to advance our understanding of how BPM can deliver business value or competitive advantage, for instance by developing capabilities to improve, innovate, or transform organizations or to tackle the challenges and opportunities of digitalization. Papers that study process thinking, organizational routines, process innovation, and the application and impact of BPM methods and tools in use contexts based on empirical observation are highly welcome, too. Areas of interest include a wide range of capability areas that are relevant for BPM, such as strategic alignment, governance, methods, information technology, and human aspects including people and culture. We seek contri­butions that advance our understanding on how organizations can develop such capabilities to achieve specific ob­jectives in given (cross-) organizational contexts. Papers may use various strategies of inquiry, including case study research, action research, focus group research, big data analytics research, neuroscience research, econo­metric research, literature review research, survey research, or design science research. Papers will be evaluated according to management and information systems standards.

You should send your paper to Track III if:

• It tackles an organizational challenge/opportunity.
• It builds on and draws from real-world organizational endeavors in BPM.
• It extends the BPM body of knowledge to better contribute to strategy delivery.
• It advances our understanding and methodology of BPM to support digital innovation.
• It contributes to solving grand societal challenges through BPM.

Track Chair: Jörg Becker

Open Science Principles

The BPM conference encourages authors of research papers to follow the principles of transparency, reproducibility, and replicability. In particular, the conference supports the adoption of open data and open source principles and encourages authors to disclose (anonymized and curated) data in order to increase reproducibility and replicability.

The evaluation form for research papers will include an item explicitly asking reviewers if the research artifacts (prototypes, interview protocols, questionnaires) and/or the datasets used in or produced by the empirical evaluation reported in the paper, are available in a suitable form. To this end, authors are asked to include in their paper a link to one or more private or public repositories where reviewers can find the research artifacts associated with the paper. This information may be included for example in a “Data availability” or “Reproducibility” subsection in the paper. Naturally, this requirement does not apply to papers that do not involve neither an empirical study nor a prototype implementation.

Authors who opt not to make accessible their research artifacts and datasets to the program committee are asked to comment in their submitted paper on why this is not possible, practical, or desirable (this statement may be deleted in the final version of the paper, if accepted). Possible reasons may involve privacy restrictions and/or non-disclosure agreements. While sharing research artifacts is not mandatory for submission or acceptance, the program committee members may use this information to inform their decision.

In the case of datasets, authors are encouraged to make them accessible via digital repositories such as zenodo.org, figshare.com, or institutional repositories, under an open data license such as the CC0 dedication or the CC-BY 4.0 license. Making available datasets via cloud services such as Dropbox or Google Docs is undesirable given the volatility of the links produced by these services.

We encourage authors to self-archive their pre- and postprints in open, preserved repositories, such as their institutional preprint repository, arXiv or other not-for-profit services, in line with Springer’s copyright agreement.

Submission

Each paper must be submitted to exactly one track. Please use the track descriptions above to decide where to send your paper. Authors may contact track chairs for clarification. Papers must be formatted according to Springer’s LNCS formatting guidelines. Submissions must be in English and must not exceed 16 pages. The title page must contain a short abstract clarifying the relation of the paper with the topics above. The paper must clearly state the problem being addressed, the goal of the work, the results achieved, and the relation to other work. Student papers are treated as regular papers in the review process. Importantly, the contribution under­lying a student paper must be carried out mainly by the (PhD) student(s), but others (advisors, collaborators, etc.) can appear as authors as well. When submitting the paper, student papers must be clearly marked as such in the EasyChair system. To be eligible for the best student paper award, student papers have to be presented at the conference by a student author.

Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format via the BPM 2020 EasyChair submission site.

Submissions must be original contributions that have neither been published previously nor submitted to other conferences or journals while being submitted to BPM 2020.

Accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Com­puter Science series. For each accepted paper, at least one author must register for the conference and present the paper. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version to special issues in Elsevier’s Information Systems (Tracks I and II) and in Springer’s Business & Information Systems Engineering (Track III).

Innovative papers which have high potential of stimulating discussion at the conference but does not fully meet the quality criteria for the main conference will be invited for presentation at the BPM Forum. Those papers will be published in full length in a separate post-proceedings volume in the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing series, as well as being presented during the main conference. There will not be short papers at the conference.

First-time submitters to BPM may request to be considered for a pre-submission shepherding program in which a selected BPM PC member advises on the presentation and positioning of a shepherded paper. Interested candidates are encouraged to contact the PC Chairs (bpm2020-pc@easychair.org) by February 1, 2020.

PC Chairs

• Dirk Fahland, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands (Track Chair, Track I)
• Chiara Ghidini, FBK, Italy (Track Chair, Track II)
• Jörg Becker, University of Münster – ERCIS, Germany (Track Chair, Track III)
• Marlon Dumas, University of Tartu, Estonia (Consolidation Chair)

Key Dates

• Full paper submission (strict deadline): 16 March 2020
  • Authors who submit their paper by this deadline are allowed to upload new versions until 24 March 2020 AoE
• Notification: 11 May 2020
• Camera-ready paper submission: 15 June 2020
• Conference: 15-17 September 2020

Remarks: Deadlines are strict. There is no separate deadline for abstract submission. Deadlines should be interpreted using the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) Time Zone.