---
title: BPM Wiki — Overview
type: overview
tags: [overview, bpm, apm]
created: 2026-04-13
updated: 2026-04-20
---

# Overview

Top-level synthesis of the BPM knowledge base. Updated when a source meaningfully shifts the global picture.

## Scope
This wiki synthesises work across:
- **Process Frameworks & BPM** — foundational BPM theory, lifecycles, BPMN.
- **Process Mining** — event-log-based process discovery & analysis.
- **Predictive & Prescriptive Process Monitoring (PPM / PrPM)** — forecasting next activity, remaining time, outcomes; runtime interventions.
- **Agentic BPM ([[concepts/agentic-bpm|APM]])** — autonomous-agent-driven process execution and orchestration.
- **Task Analysis & JTBD** — decomposing work into tasks and jobs-to-be-done.
- **Literature Review Methodology** — [[methods/systematic-literature-review|systematic review practice]], incl. [[concepts/llm-assisted-literature-review|LLM-assisted review]].
- **AI Capabilities & Adoption** — how AI is reshaping knowledge work and tasks.
- **Philosophy of Science** — [[concepts/causation|theories of causation]], [[concepts/rct-limitations|limits of RCTs]], [[concepts/methodological-pluralism|methodological pluralism]] (PHI403 Anjum & Rocca) — meta-layer reframing the BPM / PPM / APM programs.
- **Riess research line** — primary sources by the wiki owner ([[entities/mike-riess]]), see [[syntheses/riess-research-arc]].

## Current synthesis

The first ingested source — [[sources/2026-calvanese-agentic-bpm-manifesto]] — establishes **Agentic BPM (APM)** as an organising paradigm across these domains. APM's framework lets us place the other corpora in a coherent structure:

- **Traditional BPM & Process Mining** → provide the operational and empirical foundation APM extends.
- **PPM** → becomes one enactment capability an APM agent may invoke (the "predictive monitoring techniques" the manifesto cites for time-to-completion estimation).
- **XAI / causal process analytics** → materialises the APM capability of [[concepts/explainability-apm|explainability]].
- **Self-adaptive systems / RL for BPM** → materialises [[concepts/self-modification]].
- **LLMs & conversational interfaces** → materialise [[concepts/conversational-actionability]], though the APM position is that LLMs alone are insufficient.
- **Task Analysis & JTBD** → provide agent-level goal/outcome decomposition that maps onto the APM agent's **intentional model**.
- **Literature Review Methodology** → meta-layer; governs how this wiki itself should select and evaluate sources.

## Working thesis (v1)
The APM Manifesto supplies a vocabulary (frames, process-awareness, framed autonomy, PRA loop) that can be used as the **backbone ontology** for this wiki. Every subsequent ingest should ask: *which of the four APM capabilities (framing / explainability / actionability / self-modification) does this source advance, and through what mechanism?*

The intellectual lineage **ABPMS (2023) → APM (2026)** is the key narrative axis of the wiki — see [[syntheses/abpms-to-apm-evolution]] for the side-by-side. Both manifestos come from largely the same author collective; APM is a continuation, not a competing paradigm.

## Philosophy of Science as critical friend
Every BPM / PPM / APM method encodes an implicit theory of causation: correlation → Hume ([[concepts/regularity-theory-of-causation]]); intervention → Woodward ([[concepts/interventionist-theory-of-causation]]); mechanism → Russo-Williamson ([[concepts/mechanisms-in-science]]); disposition → Anjum/Mumford ([[concepts/dispositionalism]]). The PHI403 course by Anjum & Rocca supplies the vocabulary to name those commitments and diagnose where a chosen method's symptom of causation will fail. This matters operationally: prescriptive process monitoring makes strong interventionist causal claims that PPM benchmarks alone cannot validate (an ecological fallacy); deep-learning PPM inherits the external-validity problems Cartwright & Hardie diagnose for policy RCTs (it-worked-there, will-it-work-here); probabilistic PPM output is ambiguous between frequentist, credence, and propensity readings that imply different actionability. Philosophy of Science therefore acts as a **critical friend** (Anjum & Rocca's phrase) to the operational programs — not a separate domain.

## Open questions
- ~~Which PPM paper best anchors the prediction-module side of APM agents?~~ → **Resolved**: the [[syntheses/ppm-landscape]] synthesis maps the full 2008–2023 corpus and identifies [[sources/2017-tax-lstm-process-prediction|Tax 2017]] + [[sources/2021-bukhsh-processtransformer|ProcessTransformer]] as canonical anchors.
- ~~Which treatment of BPMN/DECLARE establishes the operational-frame baseline?~~ → **Resolved**: [[sources/2018-dumas-fundamentals-of-bpm]] supplies this baseline.
- Can JTBD / Hierarchical Task Analysis supply a principled decomposition of "goals" inside an agent's intentional model? (still open — Task Analysis & JTBD folder awaits ingestion.)
- ~~Prescriptive-monitoring literature post-[[sources/2021-dumas-process-mining-2-from-insights-to-action]] is not in `raw/`.~~ → **Partially resolved**: [[sources/2014-groger-prescriptive-analytics-bpo|Gröger 2014]] (early rBPO) and [[sources/2022-kubrak-prescriptive-ppm-slr|Kubrak et al. 2022]] (PrPM SLR) are now ingested; see [[concepts/prescriptive-process-monitoring]]. Method-specific PrPM papers (Teinemaa alarm-based, Metzger online RL, Bozorgi/Shoush causal) remain outside `raw/` — still a priority external if PrPM becomes the research focus.

## Navigation
- [[index]] — full catalog
- [[log]] — chronological history