Verification of Knowledge Obtained in the Study of Business Process Models

Author(s):  
V.V. Devyatkov ◽  
A.R. Kadyrbaeva

The paper focuses on the method of formal verification of knowledge obtained in the study of business process models. As a formal language for the presentation and verification of business processes, a certain version of π-calculus was chosen, and linear temporal modal logic was chosen as a language for formulating test assignments, i.e., questions, to be checked. The paper gives the rationale for such choice, and considers the principles of developing the test assignments in the language of modal logic and their usage for knowledge verification. The study proposes to automate knowledge testing with logic programs obtained as a result of the transition from a description of business processes to a verification program in the logical programming language Visual Prolog. The formal knowledge verification technique is illustrated by examples of knowledge verification. Findings of research show how the transition from the description of business processes to the procedures of formal verification of knowledge is carried out. The prospects for the development of the proposed method are discussed

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 908-922 ◽  
Author(s):  
Remco Dijkman ◽  
Oktay Turetken ◽  
Geoffrey Robert van IJzendoorn ◽  
Meint de Vries

Purpose Business process models describe the way of working in an organization. Typically, business process models distinguish between the normal flow of work and exceptions to that normal flow. However, they often present an idealized view. This means that unexpected exceptions – exceptions that are not modeled in the business process model – can also occur in practice. This has an effect on the efficiency of the organization, because information systems are not developed to handle unexpected exceptions. The purpose of this paper is to study the relation between the occurrence of exceptions and operational performance. Design/methodology/approach The paper does this by analyzing the execution logs of business processes from five organizations, classifying execution paths as normal or exceptional. Subsequently, it analyzes the differences between normal and exceptional paths. Findings The results show that exceptions are related to worse operational performance in terms of a longer throughput time and that unexpected exceptions relate to a stronger increase in throughput time than expected exceptions. Practical implications These findings lead to practical implications on policies that can be followed with respect to exceptions. Most importantly, unexpected exceptions should be avoided by incorporating them into the process – and thus transforming them into expected exceptions – as much as possible. Also, as not all exceptions lead to longer throughput times, continuous improvement should be employed to continuously monitor the occurrence of exceptions and make decisions on their desirability in the process. Originality/value While work exists on analyzing the occurrence of exceptions in business processes, especially in the context of process conformance analysis, to the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first work that analyzes the possible consequences of such exceptions.


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):  
Evellin Cardoso ◽  
João Paulo A. Almeida ◽  
Renata S. S. Guizzardi ◽  
Giancarlo Guizzardi

While traditional approaches in business process modeling tend to focus on “how” the business processes are performed (adopting a behavioral description in which business processes are described in terms of procedural aspects), in goal-oriented business process modeling, the proposals strive to extend traditional business process methodologies by providing a dimension of intentionality to business processes. One of the key difficulties in enabling one to model goal-oriented processes concerns the identification or elicitation of goals. This paper reports on a case study conducted in a Brazilian hospital, which obtained several goal models represented in i*/Tropos, each of which correspond to a business process also modeled in the scope of the study. NFR catalogues were helpful in goal elicitation, uncovering goals that did not come up during previous interviews prior to these catalogues’ use.


Author(s):  
Pnina Soffer ◽  
Maya Kaner ◽  
Yair Wand

A common way to represent organizational domains is the use of business process models. A Workflow-net (WF-net) is an application of Petri Nets (with additional rules) that model business process behavior. However, the use of WF-nets to model business processes has some shortcomings. In particular, no rules exist beyond the general constraints of WF-nets to guide the mapping of an actual process into a net. Syntactically correct WF-nets may provide meaningful models of how organizations conduct their business processes. Moreover, the processes represented by these nets may not be feasible to execute or reach their business goals when executed. In this paper, the authors propose a set of rules for mapping the domain in which a process operates into a WF-net, which they derived by attaching ontological semantics to WF-nets. The rules guide the construction of WF-nets, which are meaningful in that their nodes and transitions are directly related to the modeled (business) domains. Furthermore, the proposed semantics imposes on the process models constraints that guide the development of valid process models, namely, models that assure that the process can accomplish its goal when executed.


Author(s):  
Remco Dijkman ◽  
Marlon Dumas ◽  
Luciano García-Bañuelos

Organizations create collections of hundreds or even thousands of business process models to describe their operations. This chapter explains how graphs can be used as underlying formalism to develop techniques for managing such collections. To this end it defines the business process graph formalism. On this formalism it defines techniques for determining similarity of business process graphs. Such techniques can be used to quickly search through a collection of business process graphs to find the graph that is most relevant to a given query. These techniques can be used by tool builders that develop tools for managing large collections of business process models. The aim of the chapter is to provide an overview of the research area of using graphs to do similarity search and matching of business processes.


Author(s):  
Renata Araujo ◽  
Claudia Cappelli ◽  
Priscila Engiel

This chapter draws out the challenge of how to provide information to citizens with respect to organizational business processes, particularly public service processes. The aim is to discuss the issues concerning organizations' disclosure to citizens, particularly in describing how services are performed in these organizations. It relies on the idea that an urgent step to improve citizen participation in public matters, especially in public service delivery, is to provide citizens with ways to understand how and why internal processes must be conducted. The chapter reports on how business process models can be used for organizational communication and describes proposals to extend this communication to external actors. The conclusion presents remarks on challenges and future work.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luisa Parody ◽  
María Gómez-López ◽  
Angel Varela-Vaca ◽  
Rafael Gasca

Configuration techniques have been used in several fields, such as the design of business process models. Sometimes these models depend on the data dependencies, being easier to describe what has to be done instead of how. Configuration models enable to use a declarative representation of business processes, deciding the most appropriate work-flow in each case. Unfortunately, data dependencies among the activities and how they can affect the correct execution of the process, has been overlooked in the declarative specifications and configurable systems found in the literature. In order to find the best process configuration for optimizing the execution time of processes according to data dependencies, we propose the use of Constraint Programming paradigm with the aim of obtaining an adaptable imperative model in function of the data dependencies of the activities described declarative.


Author(s):  
YE WANG ◽  
XIAOHU YANG ◽  
XINYU WANG ◽  
ALEKSANDER J. KAVS

Satisfying quality requirements for service systems is quite crucial and challenging. However, there is a gap between quality requirements analysis and quality requirements design in service systems. In order to bridge this gap, we provide a systematic approach — ProQRASS — to model and analyze quality requirements of services based on business processes, which are frequently used to model services. ProQRASS consists of five steps: (1) constructing business process models; (2) associating quality requirements with functional requirements of services in business process models; (3) identifying potential conflicts and cooperation among quality requirements; (4) filtering out false conflicts and cooperation; (5) resolving conflicts among quality requirements. We illustrate ProQRASS through an equity trading service system. We also evaluate its capability through the comparison with other approaches and conduct a usability investigation involving industrial experts. The result shows that ProQRASS is effective and useful.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Chika Eleonu

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present a business process measurement framework for the evaluation of a corpus of business processes modelled in different business process modelling approaches. The results of the application of the proposed measurement framework will serve as a basis for choosing business process modelling approaches. Design/methodology/approach - The approach uses ideas of the Goal Question Metric (GQM) framework to define metrics for measuring a business process where the metrics answer the questions to achieve the goal. The Weighted Sum Method (WSM) is used to aggregate the measure of attributes of a business process to derive an aggregate measure, and business process modelling approaches are compared based on the evaluation of business process models created in different business process modelling approaches using the aggregate measure. Findings - The proposed measurement framework was applied to a corpus of business process models in different business process modelling approaches and is showed that insight is gained into the effect of business process modelling approach on the maintainability of a business process model. From the results, business process modelling approaches which imbibed the principle of separation of concerns of models, make use of reference or base model for a family of business process variants and promote the reuse of model elements performed highest when their models are evaluated with the proposed measurement framework. The results showed that the applications of the proposed framework proved to be useful for the selection of business process modelling approaches. Originality - The novelty of this work is in the application of WSM to integrate metric of business process models and the evaluation of a corpus of business process models created in different business process modelling approaches using the aggregate measure.


Author(s):  
Saleh Alwahaishi ◽  
Ahmad Jaffar ◽  
Ivo Vondrák ◽  
Václav Snášel

Through quantitative analysis, previous researchers have proven a significant preference towards a specific set of notations for modeling business processes. The drawn conclusion revealed a significantly correlated coefficient preference to Norm Process Chart for using easily recognizable symbols to intuitively elicit understanding in representing business process models. Further interpretative analysis to qualitatively enhance these findings will only prove and strengthen the above claimed beyond reasonable doubt. The approach is to measure respondent level of accuracy in interpreting 3 different case studies modeled using 3 different modeling techniques shown to respondents in 3 different randomized sequences. The analysis includes correlating the finding against the time taken as well as respondents’ level of confidence in interpreting these models. The significantly correlated results again confirmed beyond reasonable doubt Norm Process Chart being respondents ultimate choice. Further comparative analysis between results from an earlier investigation against the latter, revealed similar patterns in respondents’ responses despite respondents dispersed ethnicity and educational backgrounds.


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