Designing business capability-aware configurable process models

Process Aware Information Systems manage processes within organisations on the basis of business process models. These models can be created either from scratch or by reusing exiting reference process models.Particular types of reference models are configurable process models that are created by merging multiple models into a single one that can be customized to the needs of the business experts. Using those models presents two main challenges: their creation and their configuration.In this paper, we focus on the first challenge and propose a novel algorithm for merging process models into a configurable process model. The difference in our work is the pre-annotated process models with their business capabilities that report on what actions each process element achieves. Our algorithm generates configurable models that are also annotated with their capabilities that can be used to face the second challenge of these models: the configuration phase.We tested our algorithm using real-world process models to evaluate the required creation time and resulting compression rate after merging the input models. The results show that the models can be created in few milliseconds and achieving a compression rate of 50%. We further carried out interviews with domain experts to assess the usefulness and the level of maturity of this work. The results show the importance of the automation of process merging using a tool support that we proposed. However, further adaptation efforts are required to integrate this work in the working environments of the interviewed experts.     

Generating optimized configurable business process models in scenarios subject to uncertainty

ContextThe quality of business process models (i.e., software artifacts that capture the relations between the organizational units of a business) is essential for enhancing the management of business processes. However, such modeling is typically carried out manually. This is already challenging and time consuming when (1) input uncertainty exists, (2) activities are related, and (3) resource allocation has to be considered. When including optimization requirements regarding flexibility and robustness it becomes even more complicated potentially resulting into non-optimized models, errors, and lack of flexibility.ObjectiveTo facilitate the human work and to improve the resulting models in scenarios subject to uncertainty, we propose a software-supported approach for automatically creating configurable business process models from declarative specifications considering all the aforementioned requirements.MethodFirst, the scenario is modeled through a declarative language which allows the analysts to specify its variability and uncertainty. Thereafter, a set of optimized enactment plans (each one representing a potential execution alternative) are generated from such a model considering the input uncertainty. Finally, to deal with this uncertainty during run-time, a flexible configurable business process model is created from these plans.ResultsTo validate the proposed approach, we conduct a case study based on a real business which is subject to uncertainty. Results indicate that our approach improves the actual performance of the business and that the generated models support most of the uncertainty inherent to the business.ConclusionsThe proposed approach automatically selects the best part of the variability of a declarative specification. Unlike existing approaches, our approach considers input uncertainty, the optimization of multiple objective functions, as well as the resource and the control-flow perspectives. However, our approach also presents a few limitations: (1) it is focused on the control-flow and the data perspective is only partially addressed and (2) model attributes need to be estimated.     

Algorithms for Web service selection with static and dynamic requirements

A main feature of Service Oriented Architectures is the capability to support the development of new applications through the composition of existing Web services that are offered by different service providers. The runtime selection of which providers may better satisfy the end-user requirements in terms of quality of service remains an open issue in the context of Web services. The selection of the service providers has to satisfy requirements of different nature: requirements may refer to static qualities of the service providers, which do not change over time or change slowly compared to the service invocation time (for example related to provider reputation), and to dynamic qualities, which may change on a per-invocation basis (typically related to performance, such as the response time). The main contribution of this paper is to propose a family of novel runtime algorithms that select service providers on the basis of requirements involving both static and dynamic qualities, as in a typical Web scenario. We implement the proposed algorithms in a prototype and compare them with the solutions commonly used in service selection, which consider all the service provider qualities as static for the scope of the selection process. Our experiments show that a static management of quality requirements is viable only in the unrealistic case where workload remains stable over time, but it leads to very poor performance in variable environments. On the other hand, the combined management of static and dynamic quality requirements allows us to achieve better user-perceived performance over a wide range of scenarios, with the response time of the proposed algorithms that is reduced up to a 50 % with respect to that of static algorithms.     

任务计算中基于语义Web的上下文感知服务选择

针对普适环境中任务计算的特点,分析了任务计算的层次结构和复杂任务的分解策略,设计了一种任务计算中服务发现的体系结构。此体系结构依赖于服务和内容的语义表示,而这种语义表示是基于本体的、共享的。它不仅可以增强精确度和调用率,而且能够实现知识共享、基于能力的搜索、自主推理以及语义匹配等功能。据此,提出了一种基于语义Web的上下文感知动态服务选择机制,这种机制可以根据待匹配的服务的动态上下文属性来对其进行过滤和排序,从而进一步优化了发现的过程、节约了用户的时间和精力。此外,该选择机制可用于发现有用的静态或动态上下文信息,从而为用户提供最合适、最相关的服务。     

Ensuring business and service requirements in enterprise mashups

Information Systems and e-Business Management - During the past few years, mashups have gained wide attention as they utilize Web 2.0 technologies in order to combine data, as well as the...     

Social context-aware trust paths finding for trustworthy service provider selection in social media

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Online Social Network (OSN) has been used to enhance service provision and service selection, where trust is one of the most important factors for the decision...     

An ontology-based collaborative business service selection: contributing to automatic building of collaborative business process

With worldwide inter-enterprise collaboration and interoperability background, automatic collaborative business process deduction is a crucial researching subject. We have designed a methodology of deducing collaborative process by only collecting collaborative objectives and partners’ business services. The two key problems are (i) selecting corresponding business services for a set of collaborative objectives and (ii) ordering business services with serializations and parallelization. This paper aims to present a solution of business service selection and the following business process extraction. In order to solve the problem, we have defined a collaborative ontology, which contains numerous instances of business services and processes from the MIT process handbook. The collaborative ontology contains essential concepts in collaborative situations and process-deducing rules and algorithms. We provide a brief illustration of implementation within a SaaS toolkit called Mediator Modeling 2ool.     

支持QoS和用户需求的Web服务选择模糊算法*

基于QoS的Web服务选择能为用户提供更好的服务质量,而基于用户对QoS的需求和偏好的模糊性来进行Web服务选择是其中的一种方法。如何通过这种方法合理地获得最优候选服务集,是Web服务架构亟待解决的一个问题。本文提出了一种支持QoS和用户需求的Web服务选择模糊算法,该算法将用户对QoS的需求及偏好的语言描述进行去模糊化,然后选择出最符合用户需求的服务集。通过对模拟的服务质量数据进行实验,验证了该算法的优越性和有效性。     

Extensible ontology-based views for business process models

Knowledge and Information Systems - A business process model may be used as both a communication artefact for gathering and sharing knowledge of a business practice among stakeholders and as a...     

Using GXL for exchanging business process models

The graph exchange language (GXL) is an XML-based standard exchange language for sharing graph data between tools. GXL can be customized to exchange application specific types of graphs. This is done by exchanging both, the instance graph, representing the data itself, and the schema, representing the graph structure. Business process models are usually depicted in a graph-like form. This paper describes a novel application of GXL to the exchange of business process models. It is shown, how to customize GXL to exchange business process models depicted as Event-driven Process Chains and Workflow nets as examples for the control flow part of business process models. Each level of modeling is exemplarily demonstrated from the metaschemas down to instances of graphs.     

Assembling infrastructures and business models for service design and innovation

Most of the service innovation in e‐government initiatives has been initially focused on making a digital version of an equivalent physical service, followed by creating new services through either adopting new business models or overhauling existing infrastructures. The former approach uses variants of e‐commerce business models to drive service innovation whereas the latter entails changes to the backend for driving system efficiency and integration, which later serve for reorganising and improving service provision. Each approach presents a different way of assembling services, infrastructures, people and business models. The ramifications of each assemblage to service innovation are less understood. This paper seeks to examine the intended and unintended consequences of these two contrasting approaches inductively and deductively. Our findings show that a frontend approach enables quick improvements and enacts a variety of structures, with each structure inscribing a set of new path‐dependent routines in the infrastructures. In the backend approach it took longer to introduce new services. Yet the services were of a higher quality and required less modification in the long run. Quantitative analyses confirmed these findings. We attributed the alignment advantage of backend approach to better interdepartmental collaboration organised around a technology platform for system and service integration, concentrating resources on a coherent rather than a diverse set of business models. This approach realigns practices and routines and technology internally, whereas the explorative, diverse use of business models in the frontend approach for service innovation is less sustainable.     

Syntax highlighting in business process models

Sense-making of process models is an important task in various phases of business process management initiatives. Despite this, there is currently hardly any support in business process modeling tools to adequately support model comprehension. In this paper we adapt the concept of syntax highlighting to workflow nets, a modeling technique that is frequently used for business process modeling. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we establish a theoretical argument to what extent highlighting could improve comprehension. Second, we formalize a concept for syntax highlighting in workflow nets and present a prototypical implementation with the WoPeD modeling tool. Third, we report on the results of an experiment that tests the hypothetical benefits of highlighting for comprehension. Our work can easily be transferred to other process modeling tools and other process modeling techniques.     

A formal framework for service mashups with dynamic service selection

The service mashup programming paradigm is a blooming faction of service oriented Architecture for developing web applications. A mashup application constructs its functionality by combining data, presentation and functionalities obtained from online services published by service providers such as Google and Amazon. This paradigm significantly facilitates the implementation of application and reduces the workload. But it also makes the application rely on the availability and qualities of the online services which beyond its control in which case the robustness of the system requires more concern. This paper proposes a formal model to specify and analyze the behavior and robustness of service mashups under a certain environment where some services may become unavailable. The specification contains both system specification and environment situation. Refinement theory are employed to specify the correctness of dynamic service selection. The framework realizes the service selection by allowing virtual service requests to be handled by any online service having consistent interface and refined functionality. The framework provides a clear definition of the robustness of mashup systems and proposes several rules as well as approaches to preserve the robustness during the development and maintenance of the system.     

组件化服务与业务流程提取模型

为了使得客户业务需求和软件实现一致,软件开发团队力求找到正确的适合团队的软件开发过程.为达到软件变化尽快适应需求变化,开发团队需要一定的工具和分析方法支持.SOA的出现,为软件组织构建灵活应对需求变化的软件系统指明了方向.通过分析SOA的特点和面向服务分析与设计方法论,提出了一个基于SOA的组件化服务与业务流程提取模型,该模型可以作为SOA软件系统服务分析与提取的方法.     

On the satisfiability of authorization requirements in business process

Satisfiability problem of authorization requirements in business process asks whether there exists an assignment of users to tasks that satisfies all the requirements, and methods were proposed to solve this problem. However, the proposed methods are inefficient in the sense that a step of the methods is searching all the possible assignments, which is time-consuming. This work proposes a method to solve the satisfiability problem of authorization requirements without browsing the assignments space. Our method uses improved separation of duty algebra (ISoDA) to describe a satisfiability problem of qualification requirements and quantification requirements (Separation of Duty and Binding of Duty requirements). Thereafter, ISoDA expressions are reduced into multi-mutual-exclusive expressions. The satisfiabilities of multi-mutual-exclusive expressions are determined by an efficient algorithm proposed in this study. The experiment shows that our method is faster than the state-of-the-art methods.     

Hybrid approach for context-aware service discovery in healthcare domain

Context-awareness computing is a research field which often refers to healthcare as an interesting and rich area of application. Context aware computing attains environments monitoring by means of sensors to provide relevant information or services according to the identified context. In particular, wireless ad hoc sensor networks for medical purposes are playing an increasing role within healthcare. Body Sensor Networks (BSN) are being designed for prophylactic and follow-up monitoring of patients in e.g. their homes, during hospitalization, and in emergencies. This work presents an integrated environment aimed at providing personalized healthcare services which appropriately meet the user?s context. Deploying the semantics embedded in web services and context models is a mandatory step in the automation of service discovery, invocation and composition. Nevertheless, in a context aware domain purely logic-based reasoning on respectively context and services may not be enough. The main idea of this work is related to enrich with qualitative representation of context underling data by means of Fuzzy Logic in order to automatically recognize the context and to consequently find the right set of healthcare services among the available ones. Semantic formalisms (e.g., OWL, OWL-S, etc.) enable the context and services modeling in terms of domain ontology concepts. On the other hand, soft computing techniques support activity of unsupervised context analysis and healthcare semantic service discovery. Goal is to define context-aware system whose quality of retrieved services relies on the acquisition of user context by means of a robust theoretical approach. Moreover, this work defines hybrid architecture which attains a synergy between the agent-based paradigm and the fuzzy modeling. Specifically, the system exploits some task oriented agents in order to achieve context recognition, services matchmaking and brokerage activities.     

工作流管理系统的流程柔性动态变更研究

为解决工作流管理系统中流程柔性演进变化问题,结合业务模型生命周期和业务流程模型变更管理的特点,提出了一个支持业务流程动态更新模型和业务流程实例动态迁移算法。在该算法中引入区域划分法,在迁移之前进行相关数据一致性检查和影响区域比较,通过该算法实现流程实例动态调整,以适应新的变种。最后基于该算法和一工作流管理系统平台,通过一个案例来演示业务流程动态更新的过程。     

Adaptive and context-aware service composition for IoT-based smart cities

Smart Cities are advancing towards an instrumented, integrated, and intelligent living space, where Internet of Things (IoT), mobile technologies and next generation networks are expected to play a key role. In smart cities, numerous IoT-based services are likely to be available and a key challenge is to allow mobile users perform their daily tasks dynamically, by integrating the services available in their vicinity. Semantic Service Oriented Architectures (SSOA) abstract the environment’s services and their functionalities as Semantic Web Services (SWS). However, existing service composition approaches based on SSOA do not support dynamic reasoning on user tasks and service behaviours to deal with the heterogeneity of IoT domains. In this paper, we present an adaptive service composition framework that supports such dynamic reasoning. The framework is based on wEASEL, an abstract service model representing services and user tasks in terms of their signature, specification (i.e., context-aware pre-conditions, post-conditions and effects) and conversation (i.e., behaviour with related data-flow and context-flow constraints). To evaluate our composition framework, we develop a novel OWLS-TC4-based testbed by combining simple and composite services. The evaluation shows that our wEASEL-based system performs more accurate composition and allows end-users to discover and investigate more composition opportunities than other approaches.