Ontology-Based Framework for Quality in Configurable Process Models

2020 ◽  
pp. 464-478
Author(s):  
Loubna El Faquih ◽  
Mounia Fredj

In recent years, business process modeling has increasingly drawn the attention of enterprises. As a result of the wide use of business processes, redundancy problems have arisen and researchers introduced the variability management, in order to enhance the business process reuse. The most approach used in this context is the Configurable Process Model solution, which consists in representing the variable and the fixed parts together in a unique model. Due to the increasing number of variants, the configurable models become complex and incomprehensible, and their quality is therefore impacted. Most of research work is limited to the syntactic quality of process variants. The approach presented in this paper aims at providing a novel method towards syntactic verification and semantic validation of configurable process models based on ontology languages. We define validation rules for assessing the quality of configurable process models. An example in the e-healthcare domain illustrates the main steps of our approach.

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Loubna El Faquih ◽  
Mounia Fredj

In recent years, business process modeling has increasingly drawn the attention of enterprises. As a result of the wide use of business processes, redundancy problems have arisen and researchers introduced the variability management, in order to enhance the business process reuse. The most approach used in this context is the Configurable Process Model solution, which consists in representing the variable and the fixed parts together in a unique model. Due to the increasing number of variants, the configurable models become complex and incomprehensible, and their quality is therefore impacted. Most of research work is limited to the syntactic quality of process variants. The approach presented in this paper aims at providing a novel method towards syntactic verification and semantic validation of configurable process models based on ontology languages. We define validation rules for assessing the quality of configurable process models. An example in the e-healthcare domain illustrates the main steps of our approach.


2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-322
Author(s):  
Agnes Koschmider ◽  
Minseok Song ◽  
Hajo A Reijers

Formal models of business processes are used for a variety of purposes. But where the elicitation of the characteristics of a business process usually takes place in a collaborative fashion, the building of the final, formal process model is done mostly by a single person. This article presents the design and Implementation of a Recommendation-Based Process Modeling Support System with ‘social features.’ A process builder using this system will receive recommendations to complete or edit a formal business process model on the basis of previous usage of modeling fragments by her peers. Such features potentially Improve the modeling process and, as such, the modeling outcome, that is, the quality of the process model. This article also contains an evaluation of the system's usage and effectiveness, which builds on an experimental design. It is shown that process builders are inclined to follow up on the provided recommendations and that this will improve the semantical quality of the created model. However, Information on peer usage of modeling fragments does not play a big role in selecting the recommendations being followed up. This article fits within a stream of research that puts emphasis on the modeling process, rather than on the model artifact.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 207
Author(s):  
Ahsanun Naseh Khudori ◽  
Tri Astoto Kurniawan ◽  
Fatwa Ramdani

Due to the expressiveness of BPMN for representing the business processes, it has replaced EPC as a de-facto process modelling standard. As such, enterprises require to transform their existing EPC business process models to BPMN to keep their competitiveness. ARIS Architect & Designer, as a popular business process modelling tool, provides a model transformation feature, e.g., EPC to BPMN. For the sake of quality, it must guarantee that the resulting model has syntactic correctness and syntactic completeness. However, there is currently limited scientific approach available to evaluate the quality of the model transformation in ARIS Architect & Designer. This study proposes an evaluation of model transformation in ARIS Architect/Designer based on syntactic correctness and syntactic completeness criteria using an experimental approach. The result shows the model transformation in ARIS Architect/Designer has not completely fulfilled the criteria. The result opens further research challenges to improve the quality of EPC to BPMN model transformation.


Author(s):  
Jan Recker ◽  
Jan Mendling

Often, different process models are employed in different phases of the BPM life cycle, each providing a different approach for capturing business processes. Efforts have been undertaken to overcome the disintegration of process models by providing complementary standards for design and execution. However, this claim has not yet been fulfilled. A prominent example is the seemingly complementary nature of BPMN and BPEL. The mapping between these process modeling languages is still unsolved and poses challenges to practitioners and academics. This chapter discusses the problem of translating between process modeling languages. We argue that there is conceptual mismatch between modeling languages stemming from various perspectives of the business-process management life cycle that must be identified for seamless integration. While we focus on the popular case of BPMN vs. BPEL, our approach is generic and can be utilized as a guiding framework for identifying conceptual mismatch between other process modeling languages.


Author(s):  
Ilia Bider ◽  
Erik Perjons

From the practical point of view, the most important parameter that describes the quality of a particular model is its adequacy to the task for which the model will be used. The selection of a “right for the task” modeling approach can substantially increase chances of creating a high quality model. To ensure the “right” choice of modeling approach the following three factors should be considered: (a) properties of the object to be modeled, (b) characteristics of the environment in which the model is being built, (c) intended use of the model. This chapter is devoted to the analysis of these factors for the domain of business process modeling. It presents a simplified classification of the approaches to business process modeling. It lists the most essential properties of business processes, it classifies modeling environments, and it discusses some practical tasks where a business process model can be used. Based on the analysis, practical recommendations on what modeling approach to choose are given dependent on the type of the process under consideration, the task at hand, and the environment in which the model is being built and verified.


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.


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.


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):  
José A. Rodrigues Nt ◽  
Jano Moreira de Souza ◽  
Geraldo Zimbrão ◽  
Geraldo Xexéo ◽  
Mutaleci Miranda

Business Process Management (BPM) brings together the idea of effectively managing organizations and properly using Information Technology to fulfill organizations’ needs. For this purpose, BPM systems are largely used nowadays. However, most process models are started from scratch, not having reuse promoted. Sometimes, large enterprises have the same business process implemented in a variety of ways due to differences in their departmental cultures or environments, even when using a unique integrated system. Additionally, although technology plays an important role in actually improving organizations, the human factor is still fundamental, since any improvement attempt goes through cultural changes. In this chapter, a peer-to-peer (P2P) tool is proposed as a way to cooperatively develop business processes models, minimizing the time needed to develop such models, reducing the differences among similar processes conducted in distinct organizational units, enhancing the quality of models, promoting reuse, and distributing knowledge.


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