Extending UN/CEFACT’s modeling methodology by a UML profile for local choreographies

UN/CEFACT’s modeling methodology (UMM) is a UML profile for specifying global choreographies of inter-organizational e-business systems. As we outline in this paper, the practical use of UMM is limited to bi-lateral business collaborations, since it does not support nested business transactions. This means UMM does not support multi-party business collaborations. UN/CEFACT argues that UMM serves as model capturing the agreements and commitments between business partners. These agreements and commitments are always on a bi-lateral basis. However, a business partner in the middle of a supply chain must establish multiple agreements and commitments with multiple partners. It is the local choreography of a business partner that binds the various bi-lateral models leading to a multi-party choreography. Unfortunately, UN/CEFACT does not give any guidance on how to model the local choreographies. We close this gap by extending UMM by a UML profile for local choreographies.     

How do practitioners use conceptual modeling in practice?

Much research has been devoted over the years to investigating and advancing the techniques and tools used by analysts when they model. As opposed to what academics, software providers and their resellers promote as should be happening, the aim of this research was to determine whether practitioners still embraced conceptual modeling seriously. In addition, what are the most popular techniques and tools used for conceptual modeling? What are the major purposes for which conceptual modeling is used? The study found that the top six most frequently used modeling techniques and methods were ER diagramming, data flow diagramming, systems flowcharting, workflow modeling, UML, and structured charts. Modeling technique use was found to decrease significantly from smaller to medium-sized organizations, but then to increase significantly in larger organizations (proxying for large, complex projects). Technique use was also found to significantly follow an inverted U-shaped curve, contrary to some prior explanations. Additionally, an important contribution of this study was the identification of the factors that uniquely influence the decision of analysts to continue to use modeling, viz., communication (using diagrams) to/from stakeholders, internal knowledge (lack of) of techniques, user expectations management, understanding models’ integration into the business, and tool/software deficiencies. The highest ranked purposes for which modeling was undertaken were database design and management, business process documentation, business process improvement, and software development.     

A systematic literature review of studies on business process modeling quality

ContextBusiness process modeling is an essential part of understanding and redesigning the activities that a typical enterprise uses to achieve its business goals. The quality of a business process model has a significant impact on the development of any enterprise and IT support for that process.ObjectiveSince the insights on what constitutes modeling quality are constantly evolving, it is unclear whether research on business process modeling quality already covers all major aspects of modeling quality. Therefore, the objective of this research is to determine the state of the art on business process modeling quality: What aspects of process modeling quality have been addressed until now and which gaps remain to be covered?MethodWe performed a systematic literature review of peer reviewed articles as published between 2000 and August 2013 on business process modeling quality. To analyze the contributions of the papers we use the Formal Concept Analysis technique.ResultsWe found 72 studies addressing quality aspects of business process models. These studies were classified into different dimensions: addressed model quality type, research goal, research method, and type of research result. Our findings suggest that there is no generally accepted framework of model quality types. Most research focuses on empirical and pragmatic quality aspects, specifically with respect to improving the understandability or readability of models. Among the various research methods, experimentation is the most popular one. The results from published research most often take the form of intangible knowledge.ConclusionWe believe there is a lack of an encompassing and generally accepted definition of business process modeling quality. This evidences the need for the development of a broader quality framework capable of dealing with the different aspects of business process modeling quality. Different dimensions of business process quality and of the process of modeling still require further research.     

Ensuring the quality of conceptual representations

High quality data and process representations are critical to the success of system development efforts. Despite this importance, quantitative methods for evaluating the quality of a representation are virtually nonexistent. This is a major shortcoming. However, there is another approach. Instead of evaluating the quality of the final representation, the representation process itself can be evaluated. This paper views the modeling process as a communication channel. In a good communication channel, sufficient error prevention, error detection, and error correction mechanisms exist to ensure that the output message matches the input message. A good modeling process will also have mechanisms for preventing, detecting, and correcting errors at each step from observation to elicitation to analysis to final representation. This paper describes a theoretically-based set of best practices for ensuring that each step of the process is performed correctly, followed by a proof of concept experiment demonstrating the utility of the method for producing a representation that closely reflects the real world.     

FirstSTEP process modeler — a CIMOSA-compliant modeling tool

Since its market release in late 1994, the FirstSTEP toolset developed by Interfacing Technologies of Montreal, Canada has been proven to be one of the most practical solutions for business process management initiatives. Being a methodology independent enterprise modeling and simulation application, FirstSTEP has been adopted by industry leaders from such diversified sectors as manufacturing, finance, telecom, healthcare, public, and others. Its concept and approach are compatible to the framework. Most notably is the user front-end simplicity that has enabled its acceptance by the typical business manager who is not usually academic in his/her approach. The paper presents the FirstSTEP tool suite, its concept and approach and demonstrates its capabilities using an application with a most recent FirstSTEP user — America Online.     

The importance of business process modeling in software systems design

Despite diligent efforts made by the software engineering community, the failure of software projects keeps increasing at an alarming rate. After two decades of this problem reoccurring, one of the leading causes for the high failure rate is still poor process modeling (requirements’ specification). Therefore both researchers and practitioners recognize the importance of business process modeling in understanding and designing accurate software systems. However, lack of direct model checking (verification) feature is one of the main shortcomings in conventional process modeling methods. It is important that models provide verifiable insight into underlying business processes in order to design complex software systems such as Enterprise Information Systems (EIS). The software engineering community has been deploying the same methods that have haunted the industry with failure. In this paper, we try to remedy this issue by looking at a non-conventional framework. We introduce a business process modeling method that is amenable to automatic analysis (simulation), yet powerful enough to capture the rich reality of business systems as enacted in the behavior and interactions of users. The proposed method is based on the innovative language-action perspective.     

Interaction-centric modeling of process choreographies

With the rise of electronic integration between organizations, the need for a precise specification of interaction behavior increases. Information systems, replacing interaction previously carried out by humans via phone, faxes and emails, require a precise specification for handling all possible situations. Such interaction behavior is described in process choreographies. While many proposals for choreography languages have already been made, most of them fall into the category of interconnection models, where the observable behavior of the different partners is described and then related via message flow. As this article will show, this modeling approach fails to support fundamental design principles of choreographies and typically leads to modeling errors. This motivates an alternative modeling style, namely interaction modeling, for overcoming these limitations. While the main concepts are independent of a concrete modeling language, iBPMN is introduced as novel interaction modeling language. Formal execution semantics are provided and a comprehensive toolset implementing the approach is presented.     

Constraint-based metaview approach for modeling environment generation

Modeling environments for decision support systems (DSS's) play an important role in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of model-related work. The task of developing such an environment, however, is complicated and time-consuming. To improve the productivity and quality involved in the development of modeling environments, a metaview approach for generating these environments is proposed in this paper. Specifically, a constraint-based modeling framework is designed to specify modeling environments and associated modeling activities. The framework is based on a metaview that any modeling environment is a constraint enforcement system. A prototype environment generator called MetaDSS has been implemented. The practical generation of a modeling environment, a structured modeling environment specifically, is demonstrated using the MetaDSS.     

The constituents of business interaction––generic layered patterns

In order to perform business modelling as apart of information systems development, there is a need for frameworks and methods. The paper proposes a framework for business interaction based on a language/action perspective. The framework is an architecture of five generic layers. The first layer concept is ‘business act’, which functions as the basic unit of analysis. The following four layer concepts are ‘action pair’, ‘exchange’, ‘business transaction’, and ‘transaction group’. The framework is inspired by a similar framework constructed by Weigand et al. The paper makes a critical examination of this framework as a basis for the proposed framework.     

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。     

基于时域Petri网的业务流程重组建模与评估方法

采用基于时域Petri网的流程建模方法,对业务流程重组过程的可行性进行了分析。在时域Petri网模型的基础上,从是否存在死锁、制造提前期、执行时间和资源成本等方面进行了评估方法研究。通过建模与评估,减少了流程重组的盲目性,降低了重组实施的风险。     

A new verification technique for large processes based on identification of relevant tasks

Verification recently has become a challenging topic for business process languages. Verification techniques like model checking allow to ensure that a process complies with domain-specific requirements, prior to the execution. To execute full-state verification techniques like model checking, the state space of the process needs to be constructed. This tends to increase exponentially with the size of the process schema, or it can even be infinite. We address this issue by means of requirements-specific reduction techniques, i.e., reducing the size of the state space without changing the result of the verification. We present an approach that, for a given requirement the system must fulfill, identifies the tasks relevant for the verification. Our approach then uses these relevant tasks for a reduction that confines the process to regions of interest for the verification. To evaluate our new technique, we use real-world industrial processes and requirements. Mainly because these processes make heavy use of parallelization, full-state-search verification algorithms are not able to verify them. With our reduction in turn, even complex processes with many parallel branches can be verified in less than 10 s.     

Modeling and execution of event stream processing in business processes

The Internet of Things and Cyber-physical Systems provide enormous amounts of real-time data in the form of streams of events. Businesses can benefit from the integration of these real-world data; new services can be provided to customers, or existing business processes can be improved. Events are a well-known concept in business processes. However, there is no appropriate abstraction mechanism to encapsulate event stream processing in units that represent business functions in a coherent manner across the process modeling, process execution, and IT infrastructure layer. In this paper we present Event Stream Processing Units (SPUs) as such an abstraction mechanism. SPUs encapsulate application logic for event stream processing and enable a seamless transition between process models, executable process representations, and components at the IT layer. We derive requirements for SPUs and introduce EPC and BPMN extensions to model SPUs at the abstract and at the technical process layer. We introduce a transformation from SPUs in EPCs to SPUs in BPMN and implement our modeling notation extensions in Software AG ARIS. We present a runtime infrastructure that executes SPUs and supports implicit invocation and completion semantics. We illustrate our approach using a logistics process as running example.     

UML活动图的评价和扩展

作为统一的标准建模语言,UML应支持企业建模。文章首先从过程工程的角度分析UML1．3中活动图的企业建模能力,并指出了利用活动图进行企业建模的不足之处,然后详细讨论如何对活动图进行扩充才能使其从过程、基础设施、协同、行为以及信息等五个侧面全面描述一个企业,并完成了经扩展后活动图中的原语和语法。最后指出了为更好地支持企业建模,UML今后应进一步努力的方向。     

Modeling languages for business processes and business rules: A representational analysis

Process modeling and rule modeling languages are both used to document organizational policies and procedures. To date, their synergies and overlap are under-researched. Understanding the relationship between the two modeling types would allow organizations to maximize synergies, avoid content duplication, and thus reduce their overall modeling effort. In this paper, we use the Bunge–Wand–Weber (BWW) representation theory to compare the representation capabilities of process and rule modeling languages. We perform a representational analysis of four rule modeling specifications: The Simple Rule Markup Language (SRML), the Semantic Web Rules Language (SWRL), the Production Rule Representation (PRR), and the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) specification. We compare their BWW representation capabilities with those of four popular conceptual process modeling languages. In our analysis, we focus on the aspects of maximum ontological completeness and minimum ontological overlap. The outcome of this study shows that no single language is internally complete with respect to the BWW representation model. We also show that a combination of two languages, in particular SRML and BPMN, appears to be better suited for combined process and rule modeling than any of these modeling languages used independently.     

The impact of process standardization on business process outsourcing success

What is the impact of business process standardization on business process outsourcing (BPO) success? This paper argues that there is a direct impact of process standardization on BPO success, due to production cost economies, and also an indirect effect via improved contractual and relational governance resulting from better monitoring opportunities and facilitated communication and coordination. This threefold impact of standardization on BPO success is empirically confirmed using data from 335 BPO ventures in 215 German banks.     

基于MFFC信息系统分析与设计方法

该文首先分析了信息系统开发中传统业务流程描述方法———DFD、IDEF0在业务流程描述中存在的不足,强调了经营管理领域中活动主体在业务流程建模中的重要作用,介绍了一种新的业务流程描述方法,及其与计算机应用系统模型的映射关系,最后给出一个应用实例。     

基于Pi-演算的工作流模式描述

工作流模式包含了业务流程的基本特征和共性,其实现依赖于具体的流程建模语言或方法.Pi-演算是一种进程代数,可以应用于业务流程的形式化建模.本文使用Pi-演算作为业务流程形式化的工具,对存在多种BPMN表示的工作流模式进行形式化建模,以探究工作流模式Pi-演算的描述,检验Pi-演算对业务流程行为特征的表现能力.     

UML在商业系统建模中的应用

UML是一种定义良好、易于表达，功能强大且普遍适用的建模语言。它融入了软件工程领域的新思想、新方法和新技术，使用范围不仅限于支持面向对象的分析与设计，还支持从需求分析开始的软件开发的全过程，通过介绍UML在商业系统建模中的应用方法，阐述了UML的特点及商业系统中使用UML的优势。