Process Modeling: using Visio to create Petri Nets

Although the case has been made not to use Visio as a process modeling tool...

http://process-cafe.blogspot.com/2008/03/visio-devils-tool.html

... I created a Visio stencil for creating Petri Nets anyway.

Download the stencil to create your own:

Visio Stencil - Simple Petri Net Routing.vss

Example file shown above:

Visio Stencil - Simple Petri Net Routing.vsd

Likely it will create essential parts of Petri Nets but not exactly do what you want. To edit it use the Visio ShapeSheet properties, see here.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa200977%28v=office.10%29.aspx

Any feedback is welcome in the comments!

Master's Thesis

Last month I have completed my master's thesis which can be downloaded here.

Towards Cost-Awareness in Process Mining (BibTeX)

The abstract is below.

In business process management, the first step toward improvement of processes is As-Is analysis of existing processes before working towards a To-Be situation. Process mining is part of this As-Is analysis and gives insight into various aspects of processes through the mining of events recorded by a system in the form of an event log. This enables discovery of the process as it actually is. Depending on how much detail an event log contains, observations can be made about the process itself, participating resources, the cases in the process and time aspects. This information is used to improve the process. For many businesses, cost reduction is also an important motivator for change. Since most, if not all, sort of change affects processes within a business, cost reduction and process improvement are inseparable from each other. This work addresses the neglected role of cost reduction in process mining. Or, to put it differently, to support management accounting decisions on cost reduction through the use of cost-aware process mining. Taking into account existing cost reduction techniques within management accounting and extending the process mining tool ProM, this work proposes an architecture to support cost-awareness in process mining, and a first implementation of this architecture.

LyX Thesis Template

The LyX editor is a "What You See Is What You Mean" (WYSIWYM) editor which generates Latex code in the background, but takes way the burden of editing Latex code.

When starting my master thesis I used the LyX editor and a thesis template from Arya Adriansyah (who in turn adapted another template). His original is available here:

http://4ry4.blogspot.com/2009/08/tex-editor-to-write-your-thesis.html

I have adapted Arya's template which can be downloaded as a .zip file here:

LyX thesis template.zip

I worked in LyX 1.6.9. Since then a version 2.0.0 has been released, which, most notably, has better search and replace features and is backwards compatible and reads this template written is the older LyX version. Download LyX and read its very clear documentation here:
http://www.lyx.org/

The template supports:
- Layout for standard thesis sections using the report document class
- A simple short Latex preamble

- Examples of basic LyX features including figures and tables
- Code listings for XML documents

(See the latex preamble under Document->Settings...->Latex preamble of the main document.)

The template does not support more complicated latex features:
- Math examples
- The algorithm layout
- Code listings for specific languages
- Tables with special lay-outs (I included tables as figures)

- Figures placed next to each other and other placements

The template can be extended by adding packages and to the main document preamble and putting Tex insets throughout the document which use the packages.

The front page has the name and title and department layout of my University.

I found LyX to be a very good solution for me as a non-Latex expert used to WYSIWYG editors. Latex knowledge does not hurt when using LyX, and comes in very handy for doing more complicated things, but LyX for me took away of the burden of reading over Latex code while actually wanting to focus on content, and it supports main Latex features very intuitively.

Use this template and extend it for more complicated typesetting.