Modeling Business Process Variability for Design-Time Configuration

Author(s):  
Macello La Rosa ◽  
Marlon Dumas ◽  
Arthur H.M. ter Hofstede

A reference process model represents multiple variants of a common business process in an integrated and reusable manner. It is intended to be individualized in order to fit the requirements of a specific organization or project. This practice of individualizing reference process models provides an attractive alternative with respect to designing process models from scratch; in particular, it enables the reuse of proven practices. This chapter introduces techniques for representing variability in the context of reference process models, as well as techniques that facilitate the individualization of reference process models with respect to a given set of requirements.

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.


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.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (4-2) ◽  
pp. 349
Author(s):  
Ivaylo Kamenarov ◽  
Katalina Grigorova

This paper describes the internal data model for a business process generator. Business process models are stored in an Event-driven process chain notation that provides a natural way to link the individual elements of a process. There is a software architecture that makes it easy to communicate with users as well as external systems.


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):  
Bruna Brandão ◽  
Flávia Santoro ◽  
Leonardo Azevedo

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.


Author(s):  
Janina Fengel

Business process modeling has become an accepted means for designing and describing business operations. However, due to dissimilar utilization of modeling languages and, even more importantly, the natural language for labeling model elements, models can differ. As a result, comparisons are a non-trivial task that is presently to be performed manually. Thereby, one of the major challenges is the alignment of the business semantics contained, which is an indispensable pre-requisite for structural comparisons. For easing this workload, the authors present a novel approach for aligning business process models semantically in an automated manner. Semantic matching is enabled through a combination of ontology matching and information linguistics processing techniques. This provides for a heuristic to support domain experts in identifying similarities or discrepancies.


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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Mostefai Abdelkader ◽  
Ignacio García Rodríguez de Guzmán

This paper formulates the process model matching problem as an optimization problem and presents a heuristic approach based on genetic algorithms for computing a good enough alignment. An alignment is a set of not overlapping correspondences (i.e., pairs) between two process models(i.e., BP) and each correspondence is a pair of two sets of activities that represent the same behavior. The first set belongs to a source BP and the second set to a target BP. The proposed approach computes the solution by searching, over all possible alignments, the one that maximizes the intra-pairs cohesion while minimizing inter-pairs coupling. Cohesion of pairs and coupling between them is assessed using a proposed heuristic that combines syntactic and semantic similarity metrics. The proposed approach was evaluated on three well-known datasets. The results of the experiment showed that the approach has the potential to match business process models effectively.


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