Complementing Business Process Verification by Validity Analysis

2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pnina Soffer ◽  
Maya Kaner

This paper investigates the need for complementing automated verification of business process models with a validity analysis performed by human analysts. As business processes become increasingly automated through process aware information systems, the quality of process design becomes crucial. Although verification of process models has gained much attention, their validation, relating to the reachability of the process goal, has hardly been addressed. The paper investigates the need for model validation both theoretically and empirically. The authors present a theoretical analysis, showing that process model verification and validation are complementary in nature, and an empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of validity criteria in validating a process model. The theoretical analysis, which relates to different aspects of process model quality, shows that process model verification and validation are complementary in nature. The empirical findings corroborate the effectiveness of validity criteria and indicate that a systematic criteria-supported validity analysis improves the identification of validity problems in process models.

Author(s):  
Pnina Soffer ◽  
Maya Kaner

This paper investigates the need for complementing automated verification of business process models with a validity analysis performed by human analysts. As business processes become increasingly automated through process aware information systems, the quality of process design becomes crucial. Although verification of process models has gained much attention, their validation, relating to the reachability of the process goal, has hardly been addressed. The paper investigates the need for model validation both theoretically and empirically. The authors present a theoretical analysis, showing that process model verification and validation are complementary in nature, and an empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of validity criteria in validating a process model. The theoretical analysis, which relates to different aspects of process model quality, shows that process model verification and validation are complementary in nature. The empirical findings corroborate the effectiveness of validity criteria and indicate that a systematic criteria-supported validity analysis improves the identification of validity problems in process models.


2010 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 14-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rong Liu ◽  
Frederick Y. Wu ◽  
Santhosh Kumaran

Much of the prior work in business process modeling is activity-centric. Recently, an information-centric approach has emerged, where a business process is modeled as the interacting lifecycles of business entities. The benefits of this approach are documented in a number of case studies. In this paper, the authors formalize the information-centric approach and derive the relationships between the two approaches. The authors formally define the notion of a business entity, provide an algorithm to transform an activity-centric model into an information-centric process model, and demonstrate the equivalence between these two models. Further, they show the value of transforming from the activity-centric paradigm to the information-centric paradigm in business process componentization and Service-Oriented Architecture design and also provide an empirical evaluation.


Author(s):  
Montserrat Estañol ◽  
Ángel Varela-Vaca ◽  
María Gómez-López ◽  
Ernest Teniente ◽  
Rafael Gasca

The inclusion of security aspects in organizations is a crucial aspect to ensure compliance with both internal and external regulations. Business process models are a well-known mechanism to describe and automate the activities of the organizations, which should include security policies to ensure the correct performance of the daily activities. Frequently, these security policies involve complex data which cannot be represented using the standard Business Process Model Notation (BPMN). In this paper, we propose the enrichment of the BPMN with a UML class diagram to describe the data model, that is also combined with security policies defined using the UCONABC framework annotated within the business process model. The integration of the business process model, the data model, and the security policies provides a context where more complex reasoning can be applied about the satisfiability of the security policies in accordance with the business process and data models. To do so, we transform the original models, including security policies, into the BAUML framework (an artifact-centric approach to business process modelling). Once this is done, it is possible to ensure that there are no inherent errors in the model (verification) and that it fulfils the business requirements (validation), thus ensuring that the business process and the security policies are compatible and that they are aligned with the business security requirements.


Author(s):  
Rong Liu ◽  
Frederick Y. Wu ◽  
Santhosh Kumaran

Much of the prior work in business process modeling is activity-centric. Recently, an information-centric approach has emerged, where a business process is modeled as the interacting lifecycles of business entities. The benefits of this approach are documented in a number of case studies. In this paper, the authors formalize the information-centric approach and derive the relationships between the two approaches. The authors formally define the notion of a business entity, provide an algorithm to transform an activity-centric model into an information-centric process model, and demonstrate the equivalence between these two models. Further, they show the value of transforming from the activity-centric paradigm to the information-centric paradigm in business process componentization and Service-Oriented Architecture design and also provide an empirical evaluation.


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.


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