Modeling Business Process Variability for Design-Time Configuration

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.

Modelling Constructs

There are many different notations and formalisms for modelling business processes and workflows. These notations and formalisms have been introduced with different purposes and objectives. Later, influenced by other notations, comparisons with other tools, or by standardization efforts, these notations have been extended in order to increase expressiveness and to be more competitive. This resulted in an increasing number of notations and formalisms for modelling business processes and in an increase of the different modelling constructs provided by modelling notations, which makes it difficult to compare modelling notations and to make transformations between them. One of the reasons is that, in each notation, the new concepts are introduced in a different way by extending the already existing constructs. In this chapter, the authors go the opposite direction: showing that it is possible to add most of the typical extensions on top of any existing notation or formalism—without changing the formalism itself. they introduce blocks with some additional attributes defining their initiation and termination behaviour. This serves two purposes: First, it gives a clearer understanding of the basic constructs and how they can be combined with more advanced constructs. Second, it will help combining different modelling notations with each other. Note that, though they introduce a notation for blocks in this chapter, they are not so much interested in promoting this notation here. The notation should just prove that it is possible to separate different issues of a modelling notation, and this way making its concepts clearer and the interchange of models easier. A fully-fledged block notation with a clear and simple interface to existing formalisms is yet to be developed.

Modeling Process-Driven SOAs

This chapter introduces a view-based, model-driven approach for process-driven, service-oriented architectures. A typical business process consists of numerous tangled concerns, such as the process control flow, service invocations, fault handling, transactions, and so on. Our view-based approach separates these concerns into a number of tailored perspectives at different abstraction levels. On the one hand, the separation of process concerns helps reducing the complexity of process development by breaking a business process into appropriate architectural views. On the other hand, the separation of levels of abstraction offers appropriately adapted views to stakeholders, and therefore, helps quickly re-act to changes at the business level and at the technical level as well. Our approach is realized as a model-driven tool-chain for business process development.

Applied Sequence Clustering Techniques for Process Mining

This chapter introduces the principles of sequence clustering and presents two case studies where the technique is used to discover behavioral patterns in event logs. In the first case study, the goal is to understand the way members of a software team perform their daily work, and the application of sequence clustering reveals a set of behavioral patterns that are related to some of the main processes being carried out by that team. In the second case study, the goal is to analyze the event history recorded in a technical support database in order to determine whether the recorded behavior complies with a predefined issue handling process. In this case, the application of sequence clustering confirms that all behavioral patterns share a common trend that resembles the original process. Throughout the chapter, special attention is given to the need for data preprocessing in order to obtain results that provide insight into the typical behavior of business processes.

Enabling Adaptive Process-Aware Information Systems with ADEPT2

In dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement new business processes, to enable ad-hoc deviations from the defined business processes on-demand (e.g., by dynamically adding, deleting or moving process activities), and to support dynamic process evolution (i.e., to propagate process schema changes to already running process instances). These fundamental requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and robustness of the process-aware information system. In this chapter the authors describe how these challenges have been addressed in the ADEPT2 process management system. Their overall vision is to provide a next generation technology for the support of dynamic processes, which enables full process lifecycle management and which can be applied to a variety of application domains.

Using WfMS to Support Unstructured Activities

In this chapter the authors propose a solution to handle unexpected exceptions in WfMS. They characterize these events deeply and recognize that some of them require immediate reaction and users can not plan their response in advance. Current approaches that handle unexpected exceptions are categorized by their resilience property and it is identified that supporting unstructured activities becomes critical to react to these events. Their proposed system is able to change its behaviour from supporting structured activities to supporting unstructured activities and back to its original mode. They also describe how the system was implemented and we discuss a concrete scenario where it was tested.

Semantic Business Process Management

Even though process orientation/BPM is a widely accepted paradigm with heavy impact on industry and research the available technology does not support the business professionals’ tasks in an appropriate manner that is in a way allowing processes modeling using concepts from the business domain. This results in a gap between the business people expertise and the IT knowledge required. The current trend in bridging this gap is to utilize technologies developed for the Semantic Web, for example ontologies, while maintaining reusability and flexibility of processes. In this chapter the authors present an overview of existing technologies, supporting the BPM lifecycle, and focus on potential benefits Semantic Web technologies can bring to BPM. The authors will show how these technologies help automate the transition between the inherently separate/detached business professionals’ level and the IT level without the burden of additional knowledge acquisition on behalf of the business professionals. As background information they briefly discuss existing process modeling notations like the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) as well as the execution centric Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), and their limitations in terms of proper support for the business professional. The chapter stresses on the added value Semantic Web technologies yield when leveraged for the benefit of BPM. For this the authors give examples of existing BPM techniques that can be improved by using Semantic Web technologies, as well as novel approaches which became possible only through the availability of semantic descriptions. They show how process model configuration can be automated and thus simplified and how flexibility during process execution is increased. Additionally, they present innovative techniques like automatic process composition and auto-completion of process models where suitable process fragments are automatically discovered to make up the process model. They also present a reference architecture of a BPM system that utilizes Semantic Web technologies in an SOA environment.

Web Process Adaptation

Adaptation is an important concept for Web processes. The author provides an overview of adaptation with respect to control theory and how it is applied to other contexts. Specifically the author focuses on open loop and closed loop adaptation. Then the cahpter discusses the current Web process standard WS-BPEL supports open loop adaptation. Finally, the author discusses an academic research framework METEOR-S, which supports closed loop adaptation.

The Dichotomy of Modeling and Execution

This chapter introduces a set of languages intended to model and run business processes. The Business Process Modeling Notation 1.1 (BPMN) is a notation used to graphically depict business processes. BPMN is able to express choreographies, i.e. the cooperation of separate, autonomous business processes to jointly achieve a larger scenario. Since BPMN is only a notation, there is no specification for a meta-model that allows rendering BPMN choreographies into an executable form. This chapter describes how the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) help to close that gap. BPMN, SCA and WS-BPEL can jointly be used and combined to model, deploy and execute business process choreographies. We will also integrate the related BPEL4People specification, since BPMN allows human ‘user tasks’, but WS-BPEL focuses only on automated business process. The authors argue that, based on these specifications, the dichotomy between modeling and execution can be addressed efficiently. In this chapter, we will show that a key aspect of the future of Business Process Management is to combine graphical modeling (via BPMN) with a precise specification of an executable business process (via WS-BPEL and related standards).

Business Process Modeling in the jABC

The one thing approach is designed to overcome the classical communication hurdles between application experts and the various levels of IT experts. Technically, it is realized in terms of eXtreme Model Driven Design, a technique that puts the user-level process in the center of the development. It enables customers/users to design, animate, validate, and control their processes throughout the whole life cycle, starting with the first requirement analysis, and ending with the demand driven process evolution over its entire life span. This strict way of top-down thinking emphasizes the primary goal of every development: customer satisfaction.