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.

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.

Improving the quality of Business Process Models: Lesson learned from the State of the Art

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 1357-1376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fadwa Yahya ◽  
Khouloud Boukadi ◽  
Hanêne Ben-Abdallah
Keyword(s):  
Quality Improvement ◽  
Business Process ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Model Quality ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Quality Improvement Process ◽  
Bp Model

Purpose The quality of a Business Process (BP) model is vital for the successful accomplishment of all its lifecycle phases. Indeed, a high-quality BP model makes its implementation, execution and evaluation easier. In the literature, the improvement of BP model quality has been dealt with using several techniques. For instance, modeling guidelines, refactoring techniques, and transformation rules are the most used ones. The purpose of this paper is to exploit existing initiatives in this field to help designers improve their BP models. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws up a systematic inventory of the existing approaches to improve the quality of BP models. Moreover, it provides a comparative evaluation with the aim of identifying the particularities of each approach as well as the common gaps in the state of the art. Finally, it proposes a guiding framework, called BP-Quality, that supports designers in improving the quality of their BP models. Findings The usability of BP-Quality is illustrated through a case study and a set of experiments. The preliminary experimental evaluation of this guiding framework shows encouraging results. Originality/value The proposed guiding framework has the merit of exploiting existing initiatives in the field of BP quality improvement. In addition, it customizes and optimizes the quality improvement process according to the particularities of each BP model.

Towards a Systematic Derivation of an Analysis Model From Business Process Models in the Context of Model-Driven Architecture

2021 ◽  
pp. 192-217
Author(s):  
Nourchène Elleuch Ben Ayed ◽  
Wiem Khlif ◽  
Hanêne Ben-Abdellah
Keyword(s):  
Information System ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Analysis Model ◽  
Model Driven Architecture ◽  
Model Driven ◽  
Granularity Level ◽  
Model Alignment ◽  
Bp Model ◽  
Independent Model

The necessity of aligning an enterprise's information system (IS) model to its business process (BP) model is incontestable to the consistent analysis of the business performance. However, the main difficulty of establishing/maintaining BP-IS model alignment stems from the dissimilarities in the knowledge of the information system developers and the business process experts. To overcome these limits, the authors propose a model-driven architecture compliant methodology that helps software analysts to build an IS analysis model aligned to a given BP model. The proposed methodology allows mastering transformation from computation independent model to platform independent model. The CIM level expresses the BP, which is modelled through the standard BPMN and, at the PIM level represents the aligned IS model, which is generated as use case diagram, system sequence diagrams, and class diagram. CIM to PIM transformation accounts for the BP structural and semantic perspectives to generate an aligned IS model that respects the best-practice granularity level and the quality of UML diagrams.

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.

scholarly journals An Approach to Participatory Business Process Modeling: BPMN Model Generation Using Constraint Programming and Graph Composition

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 1428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Wiśniewski ◽  
Krzysztof Kluza ◽  
Antoni Ligęza
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Modeling ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Process Management ◽  
Automatic Generation ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Business Cases ◽  
Log File ◽  
User Friendly

Designing business process models plays a vital role in business process management. The acquisition of such models may consume up to 60% of the project time. This time can be shortened using methods for the automatic or semi-automatic generation of process models. In this paper, we present a user-friendly method of business process composition. It uses a set of predefined constraints to generate a synthetic log of the process based on a simplified, unordered specification, which describes activities to be performed. Such a log can be used to generate a correct BPMN model. To achieve this, we propose the use of one of the existing process discovery algorithms or executing the activity graph-based composition algorithm, which generates the process model directly from the input log file. The proposed approach allows process participants to take part in process modeling. Moreover, it can be a support for business analysts or process designers in visualizing the workflow without the necessity to design the model explicitly in a graphical editor. The BPMN diagram is generated as an interchangeable XML file, which allows its further modification and adjustment. The included comparative analysis shows that our method is capable of generating process models characterized by high flow complexity and can support BPMN constructs, which are sufficient for about 70% of business cases.

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.

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