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

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.

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (03) ◽  
pp. 1950007
Author(s):  
Nan Wang ◽  
Shanwu Sun ◽  
Ying Liu ◽  
Senyue Zhang

The most prominent Business Process Model Abstraction (BPMA) use case is a construction of a process “quick view” for rapidly comprehending a complex process. Researchers propose various process abstraction methods to aggregate the activities most of which are based on [Formula: see text]-means hard clustering. This paper focuses on the limitation of hard clustering, i.e. it cannot identify the special activities (called “edge activities” in this paper) and each activity must be classified to some subprocess. A new method is proposed to classify activities based on fuzzy clustering which generates a fuzzy matrix by computing the possibilities of activities belonging to subprocesses. According to this matrix, the “edge activities” can be located. Considering the structure correlation feature of the activities in subprocesses, an approach is provided to generate the initial clusters based on the close connection characteristics of subprocesses. A hard partition algorithm is proposed to classify the edge activities and it evaluates the generated abstract models according to a new index designed by control flow order preserving requirement and the evaluation results guide the edge activities to be classified to the optimal hard partition. The proposed method is applied to a process model repository in use. The results verify the validity of the measurement based on the virtual document to generating fuzzy matrix. Also it mines the threshold parameter in the real world process model collection enriched with human designed subprocesses to compute the fuzzy matrix. Furthermore, a comparison is made between the proposed method and the [Formula: see text]-means clustering and the results show our approach more closely approximating the decisions of the involved modelers to cluster activities and it contributes to the development of modeling support for effective process model abstraction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 170
Author(s):  
Hilman Nuril Hadi

Business process model was created to make it easier for business process stakeholders to communicate and discuss the structure of the process more effectively and efficiently. Business process models can also be business artifacts and media that can be analyzed further to improve and maintain organizational competitiveness. To analyze business processes in a structured manner, the effect/results of the execution of business processes will be one of the important information. The effect/result of the execution of certain activities or a business process as a whole are useful for managing business processes, including for improvements related to future business processes. This effect annotation approach needs to be supported by business process modeling tools to assist business analysts in managing business processes properly. In previous research, the author has developed a plugin that supports business analysts to describe the effects semantically attached to activities in the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) business process model. In this paper, the author describes the unit testing process and its results on the plugin of semantic effect annotation that have been developed. Unit testing was carried out using the basic path testing technique and has obtained three test paths. The results of unit test for plugin are also described in this paper.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-46
Author(s):  
Florian Spree

Predictive process monitoring is a subject of growing interest in academic research. As a result, an increased number of papers on this topic have been published. Due to the high complexity in this research area a wide range of different experimental setups and methods have been applied which makes it very difficult to reliably compare research results. This paper's objective is to investigate how business process models and their characteristics are used during experimental setups and how they can contribute to academic research. First, a literature review is conducted to analyze and discuss the awareness of business process models in experimental setups. Secondly, the paper discusses identified research problems and proposes the concept of a web-based business process model metric suite and the idea of ranked metrics. Through a metric suite researchers and practitioners can automatically evaluate business process model characteristics in their future work. Further, a contextualization of metrics by introducing a ranking of characteristics can potentially indicate how the outcome of experimental setups will be. Hence, the paper's work demonstrates the importance of business process models and their characteristics in the context of predictive process monitoring and proposes the concept of a tool approach and ranking to reliably evaluate business process models characteristics.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuno Castela ◽  
Paulo Dias ◽  
Marielba Zacarias ◽  
José Tribolet

Business process models are often forgotten after their creation and its representation is not usually updated. This appears to be negative as processes evolve over time. This paper discusses the issue of business process models maintenance through the definition of a collaborative method that creates interaction contexts enabling business actors to discuss about business processes, sharing business knowledge. The collaboration method extends the discussion about existing process representations to all stakeholders promoting their update. This collaborative method contributes to improve business process models, allowing updates based in change proposals and discussions, using a groupware tool that was developed. Four case studies were developed in real organizational environment. We came to the conclusion that the defined method and the developed tool can help organizations to maintain a business process model updated based on the inputs and consequent discussions taken by the organizational actors who participate in the processes.


Author(s):  
Olga Korzachenko ◽  
Vadim Getman

Improvement of Business-Activities in Telecommunication Enterprises by the eTOM Business-Process Structural Model Implementation For now, in front of telecommunication branch enterprises of Ukraine, there is a problem of activity improvement with the purpose of granting high-quality services and maintenance of competitive position, both on internal, and on a foreign market. To solve this problem, telecommunication companies appropriate to use the mechanisms of business-oriented process management and improvement of end-to-end business-processes. The purpose of this article is a choice of effective business-process model that will allow telecommunications companies to provide modern, high quality and cost competitive services. During research, conditions of the telecommunication branch enterprises of Ukraine were investigated and key problems of their activity were revealed. Existing business-process models have been considered and analyzed and the optimal model was chosen, according to the put criteria. By results of the analysis a conclusion was drawn, that to the enterprises for business-process modeling is expedient for using eTOM - high-level system business-oriented model aimed for providing of any technological services, including IT. As advantages from introduction eTOM at the Ukrainian enterprises were analyzed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 116
Author(s):  
Hilman Nuril Hadi ◽  
Tri Astoto Kurniawan ◽  
Ismiarta Aknuranda

BPMN has become the standard of business process modeling indescribing the existing series of business process. By engaging BPMN, an analystwould possibly able to model the whole business process activities in whichhe/she may analyze business process upon design time. It can be done byanalyzing the structure, behavior, or semantic of process model. In certaincondition one may ask a question what would the effects of the process be if itwere to be executed up to this point?. However, it cannot be solved with onlygraphical notation, but with its semantics. In practice, several modeling tools stilldo not provide a feature for managing information regarding the effects/resultsin the business process model. In fact, analysts should be supported with a toolin order to semantically enrich a process model with its effects. This articledescribes effect annotation semantically towards activity in the BPMN modelincluding the rules in representing its effects. The effect annotation will be suitedtowards activity type (atomic and compound activities). The outcomes of plugin development of eclipse BPMN2 modeler for representing semantic effect arealso described in this paper.


Author(s):  
Mostefai Abdelkader ◽  
Mekour Mansour

This paper proposes a method based on a new word embedding approach for matching business process model. The proposed method aligns two process models in four steps. First activity labels are extracted and pre-processed to remove meaningless words, then each word composing an activity label and using a semantic similarity metric based on WordNet is represented with an n-dimensional vector in the space of the vocabulary of the two labels to be compared. Based on these representations, a vector representation of each activity label is computed by averaging the vectors representing words found in the activity label. Finally, the two activity labels are reported as similar if their similarity score computed using the cosine metric is greater than some predefined threshold. An experiment was conducted on well-known dataset to assess the performance of the proposed method. The results showed that the proposed method shared the first place with RMM/NHCM and OPBOT tools and can be effective in matching process models.


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