The organizing committee is pleased to announce that Opher Baron, will be one of this year’s conference keynote speakers at the 2026 BPM Conference at York University. The session, titled Business Process Intelligence in Congestion‑Driven Systems: From Event Logs to Real‑Time Digital Twins, will explore how organizations operating under conditions of congestion can leverage advanced analytics and AI‑enabled digital twins to transform their operations.
Across sectors such as healthcare, logistics, financial services, public administration and large‑scale customer support, many systems now face increasing demand, limited resources and high variability. These pressures create nonlinear, congestion‑driven dynamics in which small disruptions can rapidly escalate. Baron will examine how business process management is evolving to address these challenges.
“We are looking forward to Professor Baron's keynote,” says Arik Senderovich, conference chair and assistant professor in ITEC at LA&PS. “His work bridges theory from multiple fields, including process mining and process management, and real‑world application in unique ways that will resonate deeply with our community.”
The talk will highlight the integration of process mining, queueing theory, simulation and machine learning to build data‑driven, real‑time digital twins. Using large‑scale event‑log data from real deployments, Baron will demonstrate how organizations can move beyond traditional dashboards toward dynamic process intelligence that reveals true process behavior – such as routing variability, rework loops, synchronization delays and resource contention.
The session will also explore how predictive, comparative and prescriptive analytics can support decision‑making, enabling organizations to simulate “what‑if” scenarios, optimize routing and staffing and proactively mitigate congestion before it cascades. Drawing on industrial deployments through SiMLQ, Baron will show how combining process intelligence with congestion‑aware modeling creates continuous, real‑time decision support with far‑reaching implications for performance, resilience and competitiveness.
This promises to be an essential session for anyone interested in the future of process intelligence and operational analytics. Secure your spot today – early-bird deadline is July 14.
About the Speaker
Opher Baron is a University of Toronto Distinguished Professor of Operations Management at the Rotman School of Management and the cofounder and CEO of SiMLQ, a company specializing in data‑driven digital twins built from event‑log analytics, machine learning and queueing theory. A leading scholar in operations and analytics, he holds a PhD from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and his research has been widely published in top journals. His expertise spans service operations, business analytics, queueing and supply chain systems, and he is recognized internationally for his research impact, industry collaborations and numerous invited keynotes.