Traditionally, processes have been modeled and discovered with a strong focus on control-flow, often overlooking other crucial dimensions that extend beyond these known aspects, such as “data-awareness.” Consequently, the resulting models are unable to suitably represent real-life, widespread processes where behaviour arises from the complex interplay among multiple business objects and their one-to-many or many-to-many relationships.

The recently introduced object-centric paradigm addresses this gap by explicitly representing such relationships. While this paradigm opens up exciting new perspectives across the Business Process Management field, it also introduces numerous challenges spanning the entire process management lifecycle, from modeling and model-driven analysis to process mining (PM), operational support, and considering representational issues in event data and logs.

For this edition of the workshop, we place particular emphasis on the challenge of adoption. Despite the rapidly increasing interest in the object-centric paradigm across BPM and PM, its practical and theoretical value remains poorly understood, making adoption itself a timely and pressing research topic.

On the one hand, object-centric processes need to be correctly specified and modelled. Such multi-perspective models are intrinsically difficult to analyse. This calls for a suitable trade-off between expressiveness and the feasibility of analytic techniques. In addition, object-centric models can span a complex network containing many processes and objects. Thus, they bring great potential to create models that cross process and organisational boundaries that current modelling techniques impose.

On the other hand, process mining focuses on the discovery and analysis of object-centric models from event data, which presents numerous challenges. Two key challenges that remain prominent are:

(1)  The correct adoption of various object-centric log formats and the accurate representation of richer, relational, and graph-structured event data.

(2)  The development of modeling constructs in object-centric process notations that can be effectively and efficiently discovered and analyzed.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• object-centric process modelling (formal and conceptual foundations, best practices etc.)

• surveys and case studies on the adoption of object-centric approaches

• syntactic and semantic properties, correctness criteria

• object-centric process composition

• collaborating object-centric processes

• object-centric process management and mining in specific domains (e.g., healthcare)

• techniques for object-centric process analysis

• object-centric event log formats

• data preparation for object-centric log extraction

• discovery, conformance checking and monitoring

• requirements engineering for object-centric process management

• object-centric modeling and mining techniques that support requirements engineering

• conceptual foundations of object-centric process representation

• object-awareness vs. object-centricity

• experience reports on teaching object-centric processes

• visionary papers

TBA

There are two submission categories:

• Full papers — 12 pages (including references), focusing on complete or ongoing research, case studies or tool/system descriptions.

• Short papers — 6 pages (including references), suitable for visionary and position papers as well as extended abstracts for PhD students in which they can present their ongoing research.

Submission is via EasyChair. Authors are requested to prepare their submissions following the Springer’s LNCS/LNBIP guidelines. Papers have to be written in English, and all the papers written in different formats and/or exceeding the above specified page limits will be desk rejected.

To submit your paper, go on the submission page of BPM 2026 and make a new submission to 4th Workshop on Object-Centric Process Management.

Each submission will receive at least three reviews. If a paper gets accepted, at least one of the authors must attend the workshop to present their work.

Submission: June 5, 2026

Notification: July 3, 2026

Final version: July 31, 2026

TBA

• Amin Jalali, Stockholm University, Sweden

• Andrey Rivkin, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark

• Anjo Seidel, Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany