Bridging the Gap between Business Process Models and Service Composition Specifications

2013 ◽  
pp. 124-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Buchwald ◽  
Thomas Bauer ◽  
Manfred Reichert
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Service Composition ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Process Models ◽  
The Other ◽  
System Model ◽  
Domain Experts ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
It Alignment ◽  
The One

Fundamental goals of any Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) include the flexible support and adaptability of business processes as well as improved business-IT alignment. Existing approaches, however, have failed to fully meet these goals. One of the major reasons for this deficiency is the gap that exists between business process models on the one hand and workflow specifications and implementations (e.g., service composition schemes) on the other hand. In practice, each of these two perspectives has to be regarded separately. In addition, even simple changes to one perspective (e.g. due to new regulations or organizational change) require error-prone, manual re-editing of the other one. Over time, this leads to degeneration and divergence of the respective models and specifications. This aggravates maintenance and makes expensive refactoring inevitable. This chapter presents a flexible approach for aligning business process models with workflow specifications. In order to maintain the complex dependencies that exist between high-level business process models (as used by domain experts) and technical workflow specifications (i.e., service composition schemas), respectively, (as used in IT departments) we introduce an additional model layer – the so-called system model. Furthermore, we explicitly document the mappings between the different levels (e.g., between business process model and system model). This simplifies model adoptions by orders of magnitudes when compared to existing approaches.

scholarly journals Spreadsheets as Interoperability Solution for Business Process Representation

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Wiśniewski ◽  
Krzysztof Kluza ◽  
Edyta Kucharska ◽  
Antoni Ligęza
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Modeling ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Business Process Modeling ◽  
Process Models ◽  
The Other ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Task List ◽  
Process Representation ◽  
A Company

Business process models help to visualize processes of an organization. In enterprises, these processes are often specified in internal regulations, resolutions or other law acts of a company. Such descriptions, like task lists, have mostly form of enumerated lists or spreadsheets. In this paper, we present a mapping of process model elements into a spreadsheet representation. As a process model can be represented in various notations, this can be seen as an interoperability solution for process knowledge interchange between different representations. In presenting the details of the solution, we focus on the popular BPMN representation, which is a de facto standard for business process modeling. We present a method how to generate a BPMN process model from a spreadsheet-based representation. In contrast to the other existing approaches concerning spreadsheets, our method does not require explicit specification of gateways in the spreadsheet, but it takes advantage of nested list form. Such a spreadsheet can be created either manually or merged from the task list specifications provided by users.

A Novel Approach for Business Process Model Matching Using Genetic Algorithms

2021 ◽  
pp. 1053-1073
Author(s):  
Mostefai Abdelkader ◽  
Ignacio García Rodríguez de Guzmán
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Algorithms ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Business Process Model ◽  
Model Matching ◽  
Matching Problem ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
The One

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.

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 Data Model and Software Architecture for Business Process Model Generator

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (4-2) ◽  
pp. 349
Author(s):  
Ivaylo Kamenarov ◽  
Katalina Grigorova
Keyword(s):  
Software Architecture ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Data Model ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Process Chain ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Model Generator ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Way

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.

scholarly journals Business Process Models in the Context of Predictive Process Monitoring

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-46
Author(s):  
Florian Spree
Keyword(s):  
Process Monitoring ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Business Process Model ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Predictive Process

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.

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.

Business Semantics Alignment for Business Process Model Integration

2013 ◽  
pp. 91-112
Author(s):  
Janina Fengel
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Modeling Languages ◽  
Semantic Matching ◽  
Domain Experts ◽  
Business Operations ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Support Domain ◽  
Processing Techniques

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.

A Novel Approach for Business Process Model Matching Using Genetic Algorithms

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Mostefai Abdelkader ◽  
Ignacio García Rodríguez de Guzmán
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Algorithms ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Optimization Problem ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Similarity Metrics ◽  
Model Matching ◽  
Matching Problem ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
The One

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.

scholarly journals Extracting business vocabularies from business process models: SBVR and BPNM standards-based approach

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1515-1535 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomas Skersys ◽  
Kestutis Kapocius ◽  
Rimantas Butleris ◽  
Tomas Danikauskas
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Process Management ◽  
Systems Development ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Information Systems Development ◽  
Business Modeling ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Model Driven

Approaches for the analysis and specification of business vocabularies and rules are relevant topics in both Business Process Management and Information Systems Development disciplines. However, in common practice of Information Systems Development, the Business modeling activities still are of mostly empiric nature. In this paper, aspects of the approach for semi-automatic extraction of business vocabularies (BV) from business process models (BPM) are presented. The approach is based on novel business modeling-level OMG standards ?Business Process Model and Notation? (BPMN) and ?Semantics for Business Vocabularies and Business Rules? (SBVR), thus contributing to OMG?s vision of Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and to model-driven development in general. The discussed extraction approach is evaluated against fully-automatic BPMN BPM ? SBVR BV transformation that has been developed in parallel to the presented work.

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