Learning the Control-Flow of a Business Process Using ICN-Based Process Models

2009 ◽  
pp. 346-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aubrey J. Rembert ◽  
Clarence Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Control Flow ◽  
Process Models

Recovering Business Process Models with Process Patterns

2013 ◽  
pp. 223-249
Author(s):  
Vitus S. W. Lam
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Management ◽  
Control Flow ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Interaction Patterns ◽  
Workflow Patterns ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
The Core ◽  
Forward Engineering ◽  
The Relationship

Originating from a pragmatic need to document strategies for modelling recurrent business scenarios, collections of workflow patterns have been proposed in the business process management community. The concrete applications of these workflow patterns in forward engineering have been extensively explored. Conversely, the core concern of business process archaeology is on recovering business process models from legacy systems utilizing reverse engineering methods. Little attention is given to the relationship between business process recovery and workflow patterns. This chapter aims to give a compact introduction to workflow control-flow patterns, workflow data patterns, workflow exception patterns, and service interaction patterns. In particular, the feasibility of combining workflow patterns with business process archaeology is examined by drawing on the research results of the MARBLE framework.

scholarly journals Exploring location-dependency in process modeling

2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 794-815 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinwei Zhu ◽  
Jan Recker ◽  
Guobin Zhu ◽  
Flávia Maria Santoro
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Modeling ◽  
Context Awareness ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Flow Patterns ◽  
Control Flow ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Location Awareness ◽  
Process Data ◽  
Content Type

Purpose – 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. Design/methodology/approach – 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. Findings – 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. Research limitations/implications – 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. Originality/value – 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.

Overcoming Heterogeneity in Business Process Modeling with Rule-Based Semantic Mappings

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (08) ◽  
pp. 1131-1158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Prackwieser ◽  
Robert Buchmann ◽  
Wilfried Grossmann ◽  
Dimitris Karagiannis
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Modeling ◽  
Process Simulation ◽  
Interface Design ◽  
Business Process Modeling ◽  
Control Flow ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Modeling Languages ◽  
Generic Level ◽  
Hybrid Character

The paper tackles the problem of notational heterogeneity in business process modeling. Heterogeneity is overcome with an approach that induces semantic homogeneity independent of notation, driven by commonalities and recurring semantics in various control flow-oriented modeling languages, with the goal of enabling process simulation on a generic level. Thus, hybrid process models (for end-to-end or decomposed processes) having different parts or subprocesses modeled with different languages become simulate-able, making it possible to derive quantitative measures (lead time, costs, or resource capacity) across notational heterogeneity. The result also contributes to a better understanding of the process structure, as it helps with identifying interface problems and process execution requirements, and can support a multitude of areas that benefit from step by step process simulation (e.g. process-oriented requirement analysis, user interface design, generation of business-related test cases, compilation of handbooks and training material derived from processes). A use case is presented in the context of the ComVantage EU research project, where notational heterogeneity is induced by: (a) the specificity and hybrid character of a process-centric modeling method designed for the project application domain, and (b) the collaborative nature of the modeling effort, with different modelers working with different notations for different layers of abstraction in a shared on-line tool and model repository.

BUSINESS PROCESS MODEL ABSTRACTION BASED ON SYNTHESIS FROM WELL-STRUCTURED BEHAVIORAL PROFILES

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (01) ◽  
pp. 55-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
SERGEY SMIRNOV ◽  
MATTHIAS WEIDLICH ◽  
JAN MENDLING
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Control Flow ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Coarse Grained ◽  
Business Process Model ◽  
Model Abstraction ◽  
Behavioral Profiles ◽  
Level Model ◽  
High Level

There are several motives for creating process models ranging from technical scenarios in workflow automation to business scenarios in which management decisions are taken. As a consequence, companies typically have different process models for the same process, which differ in terms of granularity. In this context, business process model abstraction serves as a technique that takes a process model as an input and derives a high-level model with coarse-grained activities and the corresponding control flow between them. In this way, business process model abstraction reduces the number of models capturing the same business process on different abstraction levels. In this article, we provide a solution to the problem of deriving the control flow of an abstract process model for the case that an arbitrary grouping of activities is permitted. To this end, we use behavioral profiles and prove that the soundness of the synthesized process model requires a notion of well-structuredness of the abstract model behavioral profile. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the activities can be grouped according to the data flow of the model in a meaningful way, and that this grouping does not directly coincides with a structural decomposition of the process, which is generally assumed by other abstraction approaches. This finding emphasizes the need for handling arbitrary activity groupings in business process model abstraction.

Change Propagation and Conflict Resolution for the Co-Evolution of Business Processes

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (01) ◽  
pp. 1540002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Grossmann ◽  
Shamila Mafazi ◽  
Wolfgang Mayer ◽  
Michael Schrefl ◽  
Markus Stumptner
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Control Flow ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Change Propagation ◽  
Multiple Stakeholders ◽  
Reference Process ◽  
Simple Rules ◽  
Process Views ◽  
Related Process

In large organizations, multiple stakeholders may modify the same business process. This paper addresses the problem when stakeholders perform changes on process views which become inconsistent with the business process and other views. Related work addressing this problem is based on execution trace analysis which is performed in a post-analysis phase and can be complex when dealing with large business process models. In this paper, we propose a design-based approach that can efficiently check consistency criteria and propagate changes on-the-fly from a process view to its reference process and related process views. The technique is based on consistent specialization of business processes and supports the control flow aspect of processes. Consistency checks can be performed during the design time by checking simple rules which support an efficient change propagation between views and reference process.

AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF OPTIMIZED BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS FROM CONSTRAINT-BASED SPECIFICATIONS

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (02) ◽  
pp. 1350009 ◽  
Author(s):  
IRENE BARBA ◽  
CARMELO DEL VALLE ◽  
BARBARA WEBER ◽  
ANDRÉS JIMÉNEZ
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Resource Constraints ◽  
Automatic Generation ◽  
Control Flow ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Term Basis ◽  
Static Part ◽  
Run Time ◽  
Bp Model ◽  
Declarative Specifications

Business process (BP) models are usually defined manually by business analysts through imperative languages considering activity properties, constraints imposed on the relations between the activities as well as different performance objectives. Furthermore, allocating resources is an additional challenge since scheduling may significantly impact BP performance. Therefore, the manual specification of BP models can be very complex and time-consuming, potentially leading to non-optimized models or even errors. To overcome these problems, this work proposes the automatic generation of imperative optimized BP models from declarative specifications. The static part of these declarative specifications (i.e. control-flow and resource constraints) is expected to be useful on a long-term basis. This static part is complemented with information that is less stable and which is potentially unknown until starting the BP execution, i.e. estimates related to (1) number of process instances which are being executed within a particular timeframe, (2) activity durations, and (3) resource availabilities. Unlike conventional proposals, an imperative BP model optimizing a set of instances is created and deployed on a short-term basis. To provide for run-time flexibility the proposed approach additionally allows decisions to be deferred to run-time by using complex late-planning activities, and the imperative BP model to be dynamically adapted during run-time using replanning. To validate the proposed approach, different performance measures for a set of test models of varying complexity are analyzed. The results indicate that, despite the NP-hard complexity of the problems, a satisfactory number of suitable solutions can be produced.

scholarly journals Detecting Complex Control-Flow Constructs for Choosing Process Discovery Techniques

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1389-1393
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Free Choice ◽  
Process Mining ◽  
Control Flow ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Event Data ◽  
Process Discovery ◽  
Event Logs ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Mining Algorithms

Process models are the analytical illustration of an organization’s activity. They are very primordial to map out the current business process of an organization, build a baseline of process enhancement and construct future processes where the enhancements are incorporated. To achieve this, in the field of process mining, algorithms have been proposed to build process models using the information recorded in the event logs. However, for complex process configurations, these algorithms cannot correctly build complex process structures. These structures are invisible tasks, non-free choice constructs, and short loops. The ability of each discovery algorithm in discovering the process constructs is different. In this work, we propose a framework responsible of detecting from event logs the complex constructs existing in the data. By identifying the existing constructs, one can choose the process discovery techniques suitable for the event data in question. The proposed framework has been implemented in ProM as a plugin. The evaluation results demonstrate that the constructs can correctly be identified.

Application of formal methods to modelling and analysis aspects of business process reengineering

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 548-569
Author(s):  
Junaid Haseeb ◽  
Naveed Ahmad ◽  
Saif U.R. Malik ◽  
Adeel Anjum
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Modeling ◽  
Business Process Reengineering ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Control Flow ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Process Reengineering ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Meta Model ◽  
Smt Solver

Purpose Business process (BP) reengineering is defined as reinventing BPs either structurally or technically to achieve dramatic improvements in performance. In any business process reengineering (BPR) project, process modeling is used to reason about problems found in existing (as-is) process and helps to design target (to-be) process. BP model notation is a widely accepted standard for process modeling. “Expressiveness” and “missing formal semantics” are two problems reported to its modeling practices. In existing studies, solutions to these problems are also proposed but still have certain limitations. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach In proposed methodology, a meta-model is formally defined that is composed of commonly used modeling elements and their well-formedness rules to check for syntactic and structural correctness of process models. Proposed solution also check semantics of process models and allows to compare as-is and to-be process models for gap identification which is another important aspect of BPR. To achieve the first goal, Z specification is used to provide formal specifications of modeling constructs and their rules and Z3 (an SMT solver) is used for comparisons and verifying properties. Findings Proposed method addresses both “expressiveness” and “missing formal semantics” of BPR models. The results of its evaluation clearly indicate that using formally specified meta-model, BPR model is syntactically and structurally correct. Moreover, formal modeling of BPs in Z3 helped to compare processes and to check control flow properties. Research limitations/implications Although the proposed method is tested on an example that is widely used in BPR literature, the example is only covering modeling elements which are part of the proposed subset and are reported in literature as frequently used modeling elements. A separate detailed study is required to test it on more complex systems. Practical implications Specifying process models using Z specification and Z3 solver requires certain expertise. Originality/value The proposed method adds value to BPR body of knowledge as it proposes a method to ensure structural and syntactic correctness of models, highlighting the importance of verifying run time properties and providing a direction toward comparing process models for gap analysis.

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