Business process management—the third wave: business process modelling language (bpml) and its pi-calculus foundations

This paper introduces the ideas behind BPML, the business process modelling language published by BPMI. BPML provides a process-centric (as opposed to a datacentric) metalanguage and execution model for business systems. It is underpinned by a strong mathematical foundation, the pi-calculus. The current paper is derived from supplementary appendices to a book which describes a ‘third wave’ approach to business process management [Business Process Management: The Third Wave, 2003]. The aim is to model business processes directly in an executable form, so that the mobility and mutability inherent in business behaviour is reflected and supported in the corresponding IT systems, erasing the present IT-business divide.     

一种分离业务规则的灵活业务过程建模方法

针对动态环境中业务应用的不断变化,将易变的业务逻辑从过程控制结构中分离,并且通过业务规则的声明性表达式描述,由此构建了业务过程模型BPM4DBL(Business Process Model for Dynamic Business Logic)。在建立规则元素的模型定义后,给出了业务规则的定义、分类和可执行语言描述,最后给出一个BPM4DBL的具体应用实例。     

A metamodel to integrate business processes time perspective in BPMN 2.0

ContextBusiness Process Management (BPM) is becoming a strategic advantage for organizations to streamline their operations. Most business experts are betting for OMG Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) as de-facto standard (ISO/IEC 19510:2013) and selected technology to model processes. The temporal dimension underlies in any kind of process however, technicians need to shape this perspective that must also coexist with task control flow aspects, as well as resource and case perspectives. BPMN poorly gathers temporary rules. This is why there are contributions that extend the standard to cover such dimension. BPMN is mainly an imperative language. There are research contributions showing time constraints in BPMN, such as (i) BPMN patterns to express each rule with a combination of artifacts, thus these approaches increase the use of imperative BPMN style, and (ii) new decorators to capture time rules semantics giving clearer and simpler comprehensible specifications. Nevertheless, these extensions cannot yet be found in the present standard.ObjectiveTo define a time rule taxonomy easily found in most business processes and look for an approach that applies each rule with current BPMN 2.0 standard in a declarative way.MethodA model-driven approach is used to propose a BPMN metamodel extension to address time-perspective.ResultsWe look at a declarative approach where new time specifications may overlie the main control flow of a BPMN process. This proposal is totally supported with current BPMN standard, giving a BPMN metamodel extension with OCL constraints. We also use AQUA-WS as a software project case study which is planned and managed with MS Project. We illustrate business process extraction from project plans.ConclusionThis paper suggests to handle business temporal rules with current BPMN standard, along with other business perspectives like resources and cases. This approach can be applied to reverse engineering processes from legacy databases.     

An integrated approach based on execution measures for the continuous improvement of business processes realized by services

ContextOrganizations are rapidly adopting Business Process Management (BPM) as they focus on their business processes (BPs), seeing them to be key elements in controlling and improving the way they perform their business. Business Process Intelligence (BPI) takes as its focus the collection and analysis of information from the execution of BPs for the support of decision making, based on the discovery of improvement opportunities. Realizing BPs by services introduces an intermediate service layer that enables us to separate the specification of BPs in terms of models from the technologies implementing them, thus improving their modifiability by decoupling the model from its implementation.ObjectiveTo provide an approach for the continuous improvement of BPs, based on their realization with services and execution measurement. It comprises an improvement process to integrate the improvements into the BPs and services, an execution measurement model defining and categorizing several measures for BPs and service execution, and tool support for both.MethodWe carried out a systematic literature review, to collect existing proposals related to our research work. Then, in close collaboration with business experts from the Hospital General de Ciudad Real (HGCR), Spain, and following design science principles, we developed the methods and artifacts described in this paper, which were validated by means of a case study.ResultsWe defined an improvement process extending the BP lifecycle with measurement and improvement activities, integrating an execution measurement model comprising a set of execution measures. Moreover, we developed a plug-in for the ProM framework to visualize the measurement results as a proof-of-concept prototype. The case study with the HGCR has shown its feasibility.ConclusionsOur improvement vision, based on BPs realized by services and on measurement of their execution, in conjunction with a systematic approach to integrate the detected improvements, provides useful guidance to organizations.     

基于Web服务的电子商务业务流程中间件引擎的研究

从数个企业提供的逻辑相关的Web服务整合为可运行的电子商务业务流程的角度出发,分析Web服务的业务流程协议模型BPEIAWS(Business Process Execution Languagefor Web Service,Web服务的业务流程执行语言),在此基础上设计业务流程的中间件引擎以方便企业之间的业务集成并管理、执行、监控生成的业务流程实例,设计的同时充分考虑引擎的可扩充性,以利于引擎功能的完善和智能扩展。     

Enforcement of entailment constraints in distributed service-based business processes

ContextA distributed business process is executed in a distributed computing environment. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm is a popular option for the integration of software services and execution of distributed business processes. Entailment constraints, such as mutual exclusion and binding constraints, are important means to control process execution. Mutually exclusive tasks result from the division of powerful rights and responsibilities to prevent fraud and abuse. In contrast, binding constraints define that a subject who performed one task must also perform the corresponding bound task(s).ObjectiveWe aim to provide a model-driven approach for the specification and enforcement of task-based entailment constraints in distributed service-based business processes.MethodBased on a generic metamodel, we define a domain-specific language (DSL) that maps the different modeling-level artifacts to the implementation-level. The DSL integrates elements from role-based access control (RBAC) with the tasks that are performed in a business process. Process definitions are annotated using the DSL, and our software platform uses automated model transformations to produce executable WS-BPEL specifications which enforce the entailment constraints. We evaluate the impact of constraint enforcement on runtime performance for five selected service-based processes from existing literature.ResultsOur evaluation demonstrates that the approach correctly enforces task-based entailment constraints at runtime. The performance experiments illustrate that the runtime enforcement operates with an overhead that scales well up to the order of several ten thousand logged invocations. Using our DSL annotations, the user-defined process definition remains declarative and clean of security enforcement code.ConclusionOur approach decouples the concerns of (non-technical) domain experts from technical details of entailment constraint enforcement. The developed framework integrates seamlessly with WS-BPEL and the Web services technology stack. Our prototype implementation shows the feasibility of the approach, and the evaluation points to future work and further performance optimizations.     

状态驱动的可执行业务流程模型的设计与实现

在企业间的流程协同过程中,为了使企业的业务规则管理更灵活,防止企业私有的业务规则暴露给其他企业,并有效地监控流程的执行过程,将业务规则库和Web服务有机地整合,构建状态驱动的可执行业务流程模型（SEBPM）。通过定义抽象业务流和扩展的业务规则,得出业务规则和过程流之间的耦合策略。给出一个SEBPM的具体应用实例。     

Advances in business process management implementation based on a maturity assessment and best practice exchange

The paper presents the implementation of Business Process Management in a large international company. The business case illustrates the main objectives and approach taken with the BPM initiative. Central element of the BPM implementation was the development of a process framework which consists of a reference process house (RPH) and common methods for process management across the company. In order to assess the implementation of Business Process Management and the achievements a process management maturity assessment was developed and implemented. The maturity model is based on nine categories which comprehensively cover all aspects which impact the success of Business Process Management. Some findings of the first assessment cycle are pinpointed to illustrate the benefits and best practice exchange as a result of the assessment.     

面向过程集成的流程协同交互方法研究

企业间集成化、协同一体化的商务运作的关键是实现相互间的商务流程协同和商务数据的协同。流程协同依赖于企业间建立一种通用的、统一的流程描述语义。该文在对流程定义语言PSL研究的基础上,建立了基于XML的流程描述元模型,并研究了该模型的技术实现,最后通过具体采购计划制定过程的XML描述,验证了该模型及实现方法的有效性和可行性。     

“过程”新论

“过程”本是计算机界早期的话题.关于“过程”的研究热潮早已成为过去,很长时间已很少有人谈及“过程”.然而,工作流和业务过程管理系统（BPMS）的出现使“过程”再次成为研究的热点.业务过程管理系统被认为是继工作流技术之后实现业务过程的创建、集成、复用的下一代技术.它在过程的描述、实现方法上用Process把业务流中的控制流、数据流和参与者统一起来.Petri Net是一种很好的描述过程管理的模型,它能够较好地描述系统执行过程中的并行、竞争和同步等特性.本文论述了建立过程模型中遇到的一些新问题,并介绍了一种基于Petri Net扩展后形成的信牌驱动式业务过程模型,和用于解决业务管理中诸多问题的方法和相关研究工作.     

An alignment-based framework to check the conformance of declarative process models and to preprocess event-log data

Process mining can be seen as the “missing link” between data mining and business process management. The lion's share of process mining research has been devoted to the discovery of procedural process models from event logs. However, often there are predefined constraints that (partially) describe the normative or expected process, e.g., “activity A should be followed by B” or “activities A and B should never be both executed”. A collection of such constraints is called a declarative process model. Although it is possible to discover such models based on event data, this paper focuses on aligning event logs and predefined declarative process models. Discrepancies between log and model are mediated such that observed log traces are related to paths in the model. The resulting alignments provide sophisticated diagnostics that pinpoint where deviations occur and how severe they are. Moreover, selected parts of the declarative process model can be used to clean and repair the event log before applying other process mining techniques. Our alignment-based approach for preprocessing and conformance checking using declarative process models has been implemented in ProM and has been evaluated using both synthetic logs and real-life logs from a Dutch hospital.     

Integrating constraints to support legally flexible business processes

Flexible collaboration is a notable attribute of Web 2.0, which is often in the form of multiple users participating different activities that together complete a whole business process. In such an environment, business processes may be dynamically customized or adjusted, as well as the participants may be selected or attend uncertainly. So how to ensure the legitimacy of a business process for both security and business is increasingly critical. In this paper, we investigate this problem and introduce a novel method to support legally flexible business processes. The proposed Constraint-based Business Process Management Model incorporates constraints into the standard activities composing a business process, where the security constraints place restrictions on participants performing the activities and business constraints restrict the dependencies between multiple activities. By the assembly operations, business processes can be dynamically generated and adjusted with activities, that are obliged to the specified constraints. Several algorithms are presented to verify the consistency of constraints and the soundness of the generated business processes, as well as to perform the execution planning to guarantee the correct execution of a business process on the precondition of satisfying all constraints. We present an illustrative example and implement a prototype for the proposed model that is an application of property rights exchange for supporting legal business processes.     

Event-based failure prediction in distributed business processes

Traditionally, research in Business Process Management has put a strong focus on centralized and intra-organizational processes. However, today’s business processes are increasingly distributed, deviating from a centralized layout, and therefore calling for novel methodologies of detecting and responding to unforeseen events, such as errors occurring during process runtime. In this article, we demonstrate how to employ event-based failure prediction in business processes. This approach allows to make use of the best of both traditional Business Process Management Systems and event-based systems. Our approach employs machine learning techniques and considers various types of events. We evaluate our solution using two business process data sets, including one from a real-world event log, and show that we are able to detect errors and predict failures with high accuracy.     

Conformance checking based on multi-perspective declarative process models

Process mining is a family of techniques that aim at analyzing business process execution data recorded in event logs. Conformance checking is a branch of this discipline embracing approaches for verifying whether the behavior of a process, as recorded in a log, is in line with some expected behavior provided in the form of a process model. Recently, techniques for conformance checking based on declarative specifications have been developed. Such specifications are suitable to describe processes characterized by high variability. However, an open challenge in the context of conformance checking with declarative models is the capability of supporting multi-perspective specifications. This means that declarative models used for conformance checking should not only describe the process behavior from the control flow point of view, but also from other perspectives like data or time. In this paper, we close this gap by presenting an approach for conformance checking based on MP-Declare, a multi-perspective version of the declarative process modeling language Declare. The approach has been implemented in the process mining tool ProM and has been experimented using artificial and real-life event logs.     

A computational model of time for stiff hybrid systems applied to control synthesis

Computation has quickly become of paramount importance in the design of engineered systems, both to support their features as well as their design. Tool support for high-level modeling formalisms has endowed design specifications with executable semantics. Such specifications typically include not only discrete-time and discrete-event behavior, but also continuous-time behavior that is stiff from a numerical integration perspective. The resulting stiff hybrid dynamic systems necessitate variable-step solvers to simulate the continuous-time behavior as well as solver algorithms for the simulation of discrete-time and discrete-event behavior. The combined solvers rely on complex computer code which makes it difficult to directly solve design tasks with the executable specifications. To further leverage the executable specifications in design, this work aims to formalize the semantics of stiff hybrid dynamic systems at a declarative level by removing implementation detail and only retaining ‘what’ the computer code does and not ‘how’ it does it. A stream-based approach is adopted to formalize variable-step solver semantics and to establish a computational model of time that supports discrete-time and discrete-event behavior. The corresponding declarative formalization is amenable to computational methods and it is shown how model checking can automatically generate, or synthesize, a feedforward control strategy for a stiff hybrid dynamic system. Specifically, a stamper in a surface mount device is controlled to maintain a low acceleration of the stamped component for a prescribed minimum duration of time.     

建模语言DSC和BPMN的对比分析

业务流程建模是业务流程管理(Business Process Management,BPM)中最为重要的环节,一个好的建模语言对业务流程的建模和开发起到非常关键的作用。各具特色的业务过程建模语言不断出现,对语言的研究、分析和比较已经成为流程设计与流程实现之间的一个重要问题。介绍了一种新的业务流程建模语言DSC(Dynamic SystemChart),并将DSC和目前比较流行的建模语言BPMN(Business Process Modeling Notation)做了比较分析。     

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.     

基于SOA和BPM的ERP系统的研究与实现

分析了传统ERP解决方案所面临的不足, 提出了基于面向服务架构和业务流程管理实现ERP系统的解决方案。在深入探讨面向服务的框架模型原理及业务流程管理思想的基础上，给出了一个面向服务和业务流程管理的企业应用框架。并结合企业实践项目，详细阐述了基于SOA和BPM集成的方法和步骤，充分论证了基于SOA和BPM的ERP系统集成开发的可行性及优越性。     

基于BPML的商务流程定制工具的开发与应用

工作流管理系统(WfMS)吸引着众多研究机构和工业界的关注,商务流程管理系统(BPMS)可以看成是工作流管理系统在电子商务中的应用。流程定制工具是商务流程管理系统的一个重要部分,该文根据项目的要求开发了一套基于BPML的商务流程定制工具,并且成功地与商务流程管理系统无缝集成,企业可以根据需求随时对商务流程进行更改,提高了企业的商务应变能力,增强了商务竞争力。