Representations of Artifact-Centric Business Processes

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-61
Author(s):  
Giorgio Bruno
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Structure Dynamics ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
Business Entities

Current approaches to the representation of business processes can be divided into two major categories, referred to as activity-centric and artifact-centric. The former underline the tasks as the basic units of work, and the latter stress the importance of the life cycles of the artifacts (i.e., the business entities). This paper analyzes the major issues that characterize the artifact-centric approach, i.e., structure, dynamics and coordination. These issues can be dealt with in various ways, ranging from separate models to holistic ones. The pros and cons of separate models and compact ones are analyzed on the basis of how they cope with three relevant aspects, i.e., aggregation, synchronization and matching. A number of motivating examples are presented along with the notation used to define them. This notation, named ARTS (ARtifacts and TAsks), considers both artifacts and tasks as first-class citizens of business process models.

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.

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.

Handling the Dataflow in Business Process Models

2020 ◽  
pp. 1681-1695
Author(s):  
Giorgio Bruno
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Task Selection ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Business Entities ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Order Handling

This chapter stresses the importance of the dataflow in business process models and illustrates a notation called DMA that is meant to fulfill two major goals: promoting the integration between business processes and information systems and leveraging the dataflow to provide flexibility in terms of human decisions. The first goal is fulfilled by considering both tasks and business entities as first-class citizens in process models. Business entities form the dataflow that interconnects the tasks: tasks take the input entities from the input dataflow and deliver the output entities to the output dataflow. Human decisions encompass the selection of the input entities when a task needs more than one, and the selection of the task with which to handle the input entities when two or more tasks are admissible. DMA provides a number of patterns that indicate how tasks affect the dataflow. In addition, two compound patterns, called macro tasks, can be used to represent task selection issues. An example related to an order handling process illustrates the notation.

Handling the Dataflow in Business Process Models

2018 ◽  
pp. 137-151
Author(s):  
Giorgio Bruno
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Task Selection ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Business Entities ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Order Handling

This chapter stresses the importance of the dataflow in business process models and illustrates a notation called DMA that is meant to fulfill two major goals: promoting the integration between business processes and information systems and leveraging the dataflow to provide flexibility in terms of human decisions. The first goal is fulfilled by considering both tasks and business entities as first-class citizens in process models. Business entities form the dataflow that interconnects the tasks: tasks take the input entities from the input dataflow and deliver the output entities to the output dataflow. Human decisions encompass the selection of the input entities when a task needs more than one, and the selection of the task with which to handle the input entities when two or more tasks are admissible. DMA provides a number of patterns that indicate how tasks affect the dataflow. In addition, two compound patterns, called macro tasks, can be used to represent task selection issues. An example related to an order handling process illustrates the notation.

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.

A Method for Eliciting Goals for Business Process Models based on Non-Functional Requirements Catalogues

2013 ◽  
pp. 226-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evellin Cardoso ◽  
João Paulo A. Almeida ◽  
Renata S. S. Guizzardi ◽  
Giancarlo Guizzardi
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Modeling ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Business Process Modeling ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Functional Requirements ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
Goal Models

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.

Assigning Ontological Meaning to Workflow Nets

2012 ◽  
pp. 209-244
Author(s):  
Pnina Soffer ◽  
Maya Kaner ◽  
Yair Wand
Keyword(s):  
Petri Nets ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Actual Process ◽  
Workflow Nets ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Business Goals ◽  
General Constraints ◽  
Process Behavior

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.

Business Process Graphs

2011 ◽  
pp. 421-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Remco Dijkman ◽  
Marlon Dumas ◽  
Luciano García-Bañuelos
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Similarity Search ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Search And Matching ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Process Graphs

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.

Raising Citizen-Government Communication with Business Process Models

2015 ◽  
pp. 92-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Renata Araujo ◽  
Claudia Cappelli ◽  
Priscila Engiel
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Communication ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Government Communication ◽  
External Actors ◽  
Future Work

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document