Recovery and Refinement of Business Process Models for Web Applications

2018 ◽  
pp. 248-291
Author(s):  
Alessandro Marchetto ◽  
Chiara Di Francescomarino
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Web Applications ◽  
Process Mining ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Model Complexity ◽  
Model Refinement ◽  
Business Process Models

Web Applications (WAs) have been often used to expose business processes to the users. WA modernization and evolution are complex and time-consuming activities that can be supported by software documentation (e.g., process models). When, as often happens, documentation is missing or is incomplete, documentation recovery and mining represent an important opportunity for reconstructing or completing it. Existing process-mining approaches, however, tend to recover models that are quite complex, rich, and intricate, thus difficult to understand and use for analysts and developers. Model refinement approaches have been presented in the literature to reduce the model complexity and intricateness while preserving the capability of representing the relevant information. In this chapter, the authors summarize approaches to mine first and refine later business process models from existing WAs. In particular, they present two process model refinement approaches: (1) re-modularization and (2) reduction. The authors introduce the techniques and show how to apply them to WAs.

Recovery and Refinement of Business Process Models for Web Applications

2013 ◽  
pp. 134-175
Author(s):  
Alessandro Marchetto ◽  
Chiara Di Francescomarino
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Web Applications ◽  
Process Mining ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Model Complexity ◽  
Model Refinement ◽  
Business Process Models

Web Applications (WAs) have been often used to expose business processes to the users. WA modernization and evolution are complex and time-consuming activities that can be supported by software documentation (e.g., process models). When, as often happens, documentation is missing or is incomplete, documentation recovery and mining represent an important opportunity for reconstructing or completing it. Existing process-mining approaches, however, tend to recover models that are quite complex, rich, and intricate, thus difficult to understand and use for analysts and developers. Model refinement approaches have been presented in the literature to reduce the model complexity and intricateness while preserving the capability of representing the relevant information. In this chapter, the authors summarize approaches to mine first and refine later business process models from existing WAs. In particular, they present two process model refinement approaches: (1) re-modularization and (2) reduction. The authors introduce the techniques and show how to apply them to WAs.

scholarly journals Business processes exceptions in relation to operational performance

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 908-922 ◽  
Author(s):  
Remco Dijkman ◽  
Oktay Turetken ◽  
Geoffrey Robert van IJzendoorn ◽  
Meint de Vries
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Operational Performance ◽  
Normal Flow ◽  
Throughput Time ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Practical Implications

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.

scholarly journals Collaborative method to maintain business process models updated

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuno Castela ◽  
Paulo Dias ◽  
Marielba Zacarias ◽  
José Tribolet
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Organizational Environment ◽  
Business Process Model ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Over Time

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.

scholarly journals Towards Aspects Identification in Business Process Through Process Mining

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruna Brandão ◽  
Flávia Santoro ◽  
Leonardo Azevedo
Keyword(s):  
Programming Languages ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Process Mining ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Preliminary Evaluation ◽  
Crosscutting Concerns ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Event Logs ◽  
Initial Results

In business process models, elements can be scattered (repeated) within different processes, making it difficult to handle changes, analyze process for improvements, or check crosscutting impacts. These scattered elements are named as Aspects. Similar to the aspect-oriented paradigm in programming languages, in BPM, aspect handling has the goal to modularize the crosscutting concerns spread across the models. This process modularization facilitates the management of the process (reuse, maintenance and understanding). The current approaches for aspect identification are made manually; thus, resulting in the problem of subjectivity and lack of systematization. This paper proposes a method to automatically identify aspects in business process from its event logs. The method is based on mining techniques and it aims to solve the problem of the subjectivity identification made by specialists. The initial results from a preliminary evaluation showed evidences that the method identified correctly the aspects present in the process model.

scholarly journals Aggregate Metric Model for Evaluating Business Processes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Chika Eleonu
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Modelling ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Business Process Modelling ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Measurement Framework ◽  
Aggregate Measure ◽  
Modelling Approaches

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.

Viewpoints on Business Process Models

2018 ◽  
pp. 788-798
Author(s):  
Giorgio Bruno
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Business Entities ◽  
Operational Activities

Over the past few years a number of viewpoints have influenced the design of notations for business processes. They emphasize the different elements (tasks, business entities and roles) that compose business process models; for this reason, they are referred to as activity-centric, data-centric, and role-centric viewpoints. The activity-centric viewpoint focuses on the orchestration of operational activities, which encompass human tasks and automatic ones. On the contrary, the data-centric viewpoint stresses the identification of the key business entities and their life cycles consisting of states and transitions. In the role-centric viewpoint, a process model is made up of several “role” models; each role model provides a restricted view of the process limited to the behavior of the role under consideration. This article illustrates how the above-mentioned viewpoints can be extracted from a global model, with the help of an example concerning the submission of papers to conferences.

Verification of e-Commerce Business Processes

2011 ◽  
pp. 105-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Feja ◽  
Andreas Speck ◽  
Elke Pulvermüller ◽  
Marcel Schulz
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
System Development ◽  
Real System ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Negative Results ◽  
Formal Requirement ◽  
Different Types

Nevertheless distinctive improvements are necessary before this technology can be applied in the real system development. Graphical formal requirement notations for different kinds of process model notations as representations of the specification of rules are also crucial, along with the ability to present the positive and especially negative results to the different types of stakeholders. And finally, the model checking technique has to be improved in order to deal with different types of model elements which are typical for business process models.

Mining business rules from business process model repositories

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 820-836 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jantima Polpinij ◽  
Aditya Ghose ◽  
Hoa Khanh Dam
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Process Mining ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Sequential Patterns ◽  
Business Rules ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Market Growth ◽  
Business Process Models

Purpose – Business process has become the core assets of many organizations and it becomes increasing common for most medium to large organizations to have collections of hundreds or even thousands of business process models. The purpose of this paper is to explore an alternative dimension to process mining in which the objective is to extract process constraints (or business rules) as opposed to business process models. It also focusses on an alternative data set – process models as opposed to process instances (i.e. event logs). Design/methodology/approach – The authors present a new method of knowledge discovery to find business activity sequential patterns embedded in process model repositories. The extracted sequential patterns are considered as business rules. Findings – The authors find significant knowledge hidden in business processes model repositories. The hidden knowledge is considered as business rules. The business rules extracted from process models are significant and valid sequential correlations among business activities belonging to a particular organization. Such business rules represent business constraints that have been encoded in business process models. Experimental results have indicated the effectiveness and accuracy of the approach in extracting business rules from repositories of business process models. Social implications – This research will assist organizations to extract business rules from their existing business process models. The discovered business rules are very important for any organization, where rules can be used to help organizations better achieve goals, remove obstacles to market growth, reduce costly mistakes, improve communication, comply with legal requirements, and increase customer loyalty. Originality/value – There has very been little work in mining business process models as opposed to an increasing number of very large collections of business process models. This work has filled this gap with the focus on extracting business rules.

scholarly journals Artifact Lifecycle Discovery

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (01) ◽  
pp. 1550001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viara Popova ◽  
Dirk Fahland ◽  
Marlon Dumas
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Mining ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Reverse Engineer ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Open Source Framework ◽  
Automated Discovery

Artifact-centric modeling is an approach for capturing business processes in terms of so-called business artifacts — key entities driving a company's operations and whose lifecycles and interactions define an overall business process. This approach has been shown to be especially suitable in the context of processes where one-to-many or many-to-many relations exist between the entities involved in the process. As a contribution towards building up a body of methods to support artifact-centric modeling, this article presents a method for automated discovery of artifact-centric process models starting from logs consisting of flat collections of event records. We decompose the problem in such a way that a wide range of existing (non-artifact-centric) automated process discovery methods can be reused in a flexible manner. The presented methods are implemented as a package for ProM, a generic open-source framework for process mining. The methods have been applied to reverse-engineer an artifact-centric process model starting from logs of a real-life business process.

Viewpoints on Business Process Models

2019 ◽  
pp. 405-416
Author(s):  
Giorgio Bruno
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Global Model ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Business Entities ◽  
Operational Activities

Over the past few years, a number of viewpoints have influenced the design of notations for business processes. They emphasize the different elements (tasks, business entities, and roles) that compose business process models; for this reason, they are referred to as activity-centric, data-centric, and role-centric viewpoints. The activity-centric viewpoint focuses on the orchestration of operational activities, which encompass human tasks and automatic ones. On the contrary, the data-centric viewpoint stresses the identification of the key business entities and their lifecycles consisting of states and transitions. In the role-centric viewpoint, a process model is made up of several “role” models; each role model provides a restricted view of the process limited to the behavior of the role under consideration. This chapter illustrates how the above-mentioned viewpoints can be extracted from a global model, with the help of an example concerning the submission of papers to conferences.

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