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Context-awareness has emerged as an important principle in the design of flexible business processes. The goal of the research is to develop an approach to extend context-aware business process modeling toward location-awareness. The purpose of this paper is to identify and conceptualize location-dependencies in process modeling.

This paper uses a pattern-based approach to identify location-dependency in process models. The authors design specifications for these patterns. The authors present illustrative examples and evaluate the identified patterns through a literature review of published process cases.

This paper introduces location-awareness as a new perspective to extend context-awareness in BPM research, by introducing relevant location concepts such as location-awareness and location-dependencies. The authors identify five basic location-dependent control-flow patterns that can be captured in process models. And the authors identify location-dependencies in several existing case studies of business processes.

The authors focus exclusively on the control-flow perspective of process models. Further work needs to extend the research to address location-dependencies in process data or resources. Further empirical work is needed to explore determinants and consequences of the modeling of location-dependencies.

As existing literature mostly focusses on the broad context of business process, location in process modeling still is treated as “second class citizen” in theory and in practice. This paper discusses the vital role of location-dependencies within business processes. The proposed five basic location-dependent control-flow patterns are novel and useful to explain location-dependency in business process models. They provide a conceptual basis for further exploration of location-awareness in the management of business processes.

Emergency managers face coordinative challenges that require a high degree of mobility, flexibility and the ability to interpret heterogeneous, location-dependent information of various sources and quality. Recent information and communication technology-driven developments like crowdsourcing or social networks have opened up new organizational possibilities for emergency managers. To make quick but solid decisions, and improve the coordination of activities performed by crowdsourcees during disaster response, the authors suggest the use of collaborative features from crowdsourcing and inherent availability of resources from social network effects. In this paper, the idea of considering collaboration and crowdsourcing as drivers for flexibility in the design of business processes in the context of emergency management is prepared, the meaning of location-dependent tasks for volunteers is investigated, and the added value of social network effects is substantiated.

This paper is part of an ongoing research project in the field of crowdsourcing. It represents conceptual work that builds on relevant literature.

In terms of emergency management, the paper sheds light on what emergency managers may consider when coordinating activities performed by volunteers and how they may benefit from social network effects. Furthermore, it is shown how they can exploit information using collaboration-based and tournament-like crowdsourcing, how they can benefit from invoking additional resources using weak ties from social networks, and how visualization of information may support decision-making.

Exemplary applications to exploit crowdsourcing and social network effects to support improvisation and to respond flexibly in disaster response are given.

This paper suggests novel collaborative approaches to support emergency managers in their decision-making. Based on social network analysis, the value of weak ties is elaborated, and based on a taxonomy from crowdsourcing, distinct collaborative alternatives are developed and proposed for application in emergency management.