A HIERARCHICAL MEASUREMENT FRAMEWORK FOR THE EVALUATION OF AUTOMATED BUSINESS PROCESSES

Author(s):  
ROSSELLA AIELLO ◽  
ANTONIO ESPOSITO ◽  
GIANCARLO NOTA

The problem of performance evaluation of business processes supported by Workflow Management Systems is a recent research issue. In this paper we propose a measurement framework in which several aspects concerning the timing and working of a business process, either as a whole or in terms of its components, can be precisely quantified. Our approach is based on the workflow model introduced by the Workflow Management Coalition and introduces some fundamental measures from which a number of derived measures can be hierarchically obtained. The paper describes the basic structures and the primitive operators of the framework as well as the fundamental and derived measures. Techniques for the evaluation of complex processes are also discussed. The proposed framework is quite general and can be applied to research and commercial workflow management systems with relatively little implementation effort.

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-20
Author(s):  
John Ndeta ◽  
Stamatia A. Katriou ◽  
Kerstin V. Siakas

Abstract In today’s highly competitive and rapidly changing environment, e-businesses constantly have to modify their business processes, i.e. the flow of documents and tasks in a business also known as workflow. More flexible Workflow Management Systems are required to support these constantly changing processes. In this research a platform independent architecture for the design of e-workflow systems is illustrated. The architecture includes an information pool, namely a Workflow Pattern Repository, which contains patterns, which are repeatable solutions to reoccurring problems, in order to make the system more apt to change and assist the workflow designer/user in defining workflows faster and more accurately. The patterns in the repository are in the form of UML activity diagram templates. A straightforward input format for storing patterns in the repository is provided along with an example of its practical application.


2014 ◽  
Vol 56 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Bauereiß ◽  
Dieter Hutter

AbstractWorkflow management plays an important role in analyzing and automating business processes. Security requirements in workflow management systems are typically mapped to (role-based) access control configurations. This paper focuses on information flow control, taking into account implicit information leaks. The presented approach operates on a specification level in which no executable program is available yet. We illustrate the modeling of a workflow management system as a composition of state-event systems, each representing one of the activities of the workflow. This facilitates distributed deployment and eases verification by splitting up the verification of the overall system into verification of the individual components. Confidentiality requirements are modeled in terms of information flow predicates using the MAKS framework and verified following existing decomposition methodologies, which are adapted for open systems with ongoing user interaction. We discuss the interaction with other security requirements, notably separation of duty.


2012 ◽  
Vol 601 ◽  
pp. 401-405
Author(s):  
Wen Bo Zhou ◽  
Shu Zhen Yao

The degree of flexibility of workflow management systems heavily influences the way business processes are executed. Constraint-based models are considered to be more flexible than traditional models because of their semantics: everything that does not violate constraints is allowed. More and more people use declarative languages to define workflow, such as linear temporal logic. But how to guarantee the correctness of the model based on the linear temporal logic is still a problem. This article proposes a way to verify the model based on Büchi automaton and gives the corresponding algorithms. Thus the verification of declarative workflow based on the linear temporal logic is solved.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Feng Chen ◽  
Da Tang ◽  
Hongji Yang ◽  
Mohammed Alawairdhi

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) become the basic technology for organizations to build their Information Systems. To understand the business processes already implemented in the existing software systems and then build the workflow oriented Information System is a time-consuming and error prone process. This paper proposes a unified software reengineering approach from a business process perspective. A workflow extraction method is developed to elicit the business processes from existing systems. A precondition-based workflow model is designed for this purpose, which is an activity-centred method for program analysis. The calculation of the activity?s whole condition provides powerful analysis techniques to verify the correctness of the recovered workflow model. Through the proposed approach, the workflow procedures can be recovered from the existing system and verified by the precondition analysis.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Gordana Milosavljevic ◽  
Goran Sladic ◽  
Branko Milosavljevic ◽  
Miroslav Zaric ◽  
Stevan Gostojic ◽  
...  

Workflow management systems (WfMS) are used to automate and facilitate business processes of an enterprise. To simplify the administration, it is a common practice in many WfMS solutions to allocate a role to perform each activity of the process and then assign one or more users to each role. Typically, access control for WfMS is role-based with a support of constraints on users and roles. However, merely using role and constraints concepts can hardly satisfy modern access control requirements of a contemporary enterprise. Permissions should not solely depend on common static and dynamic principles, but they must be influenced by the context in which the access is requested. In this paper, we focus on the definition and enforcement of the context-sensitive constraints for workflow systems. We extended the common role-based constraints listed in literature with context-sensitive information and workflow specific components. Also, we propose a mechanism for enforcing such constraints within WfMS.


2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (03n04) ◽  
pp. 481-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
WEIGANG WANG ◽  
KEVIN FINCH ◽  
JESSICA RUBART ◽  
JOERG M. HAAKE

Due to the separation of project management systems and workflow management systems, there is a gap between project plans and process support used to implement them. Often, managers could not see what was going on in their businesses until it was too late to react. In this paper, a cooperative hypermedia approach and an integration framework are developed to provide an integrated support for project planning, workflow management, information management and teamwork. The cooperative hypermedia-based process model has many desirable computational properties. The cooperative hypermedia tools built on this model can support distributed project teams to create, analyze, execute, monitor and adapt a project plan cooperatively. Case studies and user experiences of the cooperative hypermedia system demonstrate that the cooperative hypermedia approach can facilitate team members to identify emerging problems, to discuss and adapt the plan cooperatively. It is a promising approach to bridge the gap between project management and workflow management systems so as to support flexible business processes of real-time project teams.


2010 ◽  
Vol 426-427 ◽  
pp. 343-347
Author(s):  
Rui Wang

Workflow management systems (WFMS) are complex distributed systems, which are geared for the orchestration of business processes across multiple organizations. In order to adapt to the heterogeneous, distributed and dynamic environment, we propose a goal-oriented active service model. The model is designed to support organizational coevolution for providing workflow services. This paper reviews the introduction and motivation for active service approach, discusses the technologies used in active service, which represents steps towards the end goal of building virtual service group and organizational coevolutionary(COE) algorithm.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Itana Maria De Souza Gimenes ◽  
Fabrício Ricardo Lazilha ◽  
Edson Alves De Oliveira Junior ◽  
Leonor Barroca

This paper presents a component-based product line for workflow management systems. The process followed to design the product line was based on the Catalysis method. Extensions were made to represent variability across the process. The domain of workflow management systems has been shown to be appropriate to the application of the product line approach as there are a standard architecture and models established by a regulatory board, the Workflow Management Coalition. In addition, there is a demand for similar workflow management systems but with some different features. The product line architecture was evaluated with Rapide simulation tools. The evaluation was based on selected scenarios, thus, avoiding implementation issues. The strategy that has been used to populate the architecture and experiment with the product line is shown. In particular, the design of the workflow execution manager component is described.


2011 ◽  
Vol 211-212 ◽  
pp. 310-314
Author(s):  
Qing Liang Zeng ◽  
Tie Li Ye ◽  
Li Rong Wan ◽  
Kun Lv

Collaborative product development (CPD) is a dynamic collaborative process. A workflow model supporting CPD can provide a powerful and orderly workflow management for modern product development. This paper studies the requirements of CPD towards the workflow model, establishes a workflow metamodel supporting CPD process, proposes an idea of ontology-based workflow modeling and builds the workflow ontology model, which will strongly support interactive manipulation between the workflow management systems of collaborative product development.


2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (04) ◽  
pp. 509-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIN HYUN SON ◽  
JUNG HOON KIM ◽  
MYOUNG HO KIM

Workflow management systems should efficiently manage workflow constraints such as time, resource, and cost during workflow executions. Especially, workflow time management is important in timely scheduling of workflow process execution, avoiding deadline violations, and improving the workflow throughput. Though there have been some studies on the dynamic deadline management in a workflow, the importance of the static deadline management has not been much addressed in the past. We first describe our workflow model considered in this paper. Then, we propose a static deadline allocation method that can facilitate an efficient workflow processing. The proposed method can achieve high workflow throughput by analyzing the interrelated workflow components. We also present various experimental results that show the usefulness and efficiency of the method.


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