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.     

基于结构化定理的BPMN结构化方法

在基于标准模型驱动业务流程的开发环境中,需要把模型转换为代码。该文提出一种新的基于结构化定理的解决方法,把业务过程建模符号的非结构化程序转化为结构化程序,并通过一个实际案例说明其可行性。实验结果表明,该方法是有效的。     

BPMN 2.0编排的形式语义和分析

BPMN 2.0编排已成为描述业务流程间交互事实上的标准.BPMN 2.0编排面向流的特征,使之会产生控制流方面的语义错误.因此,检查编排语义正确性是BPMN 2.0编排建模工具所期望具有的功能.但是,BPMN 2.0标准规约中编排缺少形式语义及相应的分析技术,这阻碍了对BPMN 2.0编排的语义分析.本文提出了一种映射,用于将BPMN 2.0编排转换为工作流网,使用Petri网来形式定义BPMN 2.0编排的语义.借助Petri网的分析技术,这种定义的语义可用来分析BPMN 2.0编排的结构和控制流方面的错误.该映射和语义分析已被实现为一种工具.实验结果表明,这种形式化可以识别BPM AI过程模型库中编排的语义错误.     

Investigating the effort of using business process management technology: Results from a controlled experiment

Business Process Management (BPM) technology has become an important instrument for supporting complex coordination scenarios and for improving business process performance. When considering its use, however, enterprises typically have to rely on vendor promises or qualitative reports. What is still missing and what is demanded by IT decision makers are quantitative evaluations based on empirical and experimental research. This paper picks up this demand and illustrates how experimental research can be applied to technologies enabling enterprises to coordinate their business processes and to associate them with related artifacts and resources. The conducted experiment compares the effort for implementing and maintaining a sample business process either based on standard workflow technology or on a case handling system. We motivate and describe the experimental design, discuss threats for the validity of our experimental results (as well as risk mitigations), and present the results of our experiment. In general, more experimental research is needed in order to obtain valid data on the various aspects and effects of BPM technology and BPM tools.     

Analysing factors impacting BPMS performance: a case of a challenged technology adoption

Business Process Management Suites (BPMSs) have been adopted in organisations to model, improve and automate business processes as they aim to increase the quality, efficiency and agility of their business processes. Yet, many organisations struggle to achieve the benefits they expected from a BPMS. This interpretive case study in a large South African financial services organisation explains factors found to negatively impact successful BPMS adoption. The paper describes how an IT team struggled to increase process agility with a BPMS in a large legacy application landscape. The dominant factors causing the struggle were the difficulty of integrating with other applications and a lack of governance around BPM. Interesting findings on the difficulties in resourcing BPM IT teams are presented. The impact of BPM strategy, culture and governance on BPM methods, resourcing, data and technology is explained. The BPM literature lacks empirical qualitative case studies and theoretical models. This paper aimed to contribute to both needs. The theoretical contribution of this paper is two models. The first inductively derived explanatory contextual model should be useful for practitioners wanting to adopt a BPMS. Using this study’s findings and models from the literature, a second, more generic explanatory model of information system performance is derived for a BPMS.

     

BPMN: An introduction to the standard

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is the de-facto standard for representing in a very expressive graphical way the processes occurring in virtually every kind of organization one can think of, from cuisine recipes to the Nobel Prize assignment process, incident management, e-mail voting systems, travel booking procedures, to name a few. In this work, we give an overview of BPMN and we present what are the links with other well-known machineries such as BPEL and XPDL. We give an assessment of how the OMG's BPMN standard is perceived and used by practitioners in everyday business process modeling chores.     

Assessing flexibility in event-driven process adaptation

Business process management (BPM) has emerged as a prominent information management approach focusing on the design, execution and governance of organizational business processes. The ability to deal with both foreseen and unforeseen changes in business processes is considered critical for contemporary business process management systems. This paper proposes an approach that couples an event-driven framework for detecting and reasoning in situations that pose the need for process adaptations with MCDM methods for selecting adaptations. The proposed approach has been implemented in an aspect-oriented extension of a BPMN2.0 engine in order to enact adaptations of business processes in real-time.     

Semantic business process space for intelligent management of sales order business processes

A company??s competitiveness relies heavily on its business processes and accurate knowledge to execute its business processes with agility and efficiency. Business Process Management (BPM) initially promised to provide the business world with suitable tools and techniques for successful BPM without help from the IT world. However, the current practice of BPM has several fundamental problems, including difficulty with automatic discovery and the integration of business processes across organizations. Understanding that the main cause of these problems lies in the lack of semantics on business process, we first define a variety of business process ontologies in order to build a semantic business process space (SBPS) for the limited area of sales order. We then explain how the SBPS satisfies the requirements for successful implementation of semantic BPM (SBPM) and demonstrate with a scenario how SBPM can be realized in the environment of SBPS. Our novel approach will reduce the time and cost necessary for the development of a new business process in a fast-changing environment and provide practitioners with useful insights into the proper implementation of the SBPM. Although our paper defines semantic business process knowledge for only a limited domain, its insights can be readily extended to other areas of business.     

业务流程模型的BPEL实现

由于BPEL语言的XML表示十分冗长以及没有形式化的分析技术,其抽象级别不适合用于业务流程分析和设计.而业务流程分析师和设计者更容易接受高级别的抽象模式,例如BPMN(Business Process Modeling Notation).很多建模工具支持BPMN,但是到目前为止没有系统可直接执行BPMN模型.因此,需...     

Process mining using BPMN: relating event logs and process models

Process-aware information systems (PAIS) are systems relying on processes, which involve human and software resources to achieve concrete goals. There is a need to develop approaches for modeling, analysis, improvement and monitoring processes within PAIS. These approaches include process mining techniques used to discover process models from event logs, find log and model deviations, and analyze performance characteristics of processes. The representational bias (a way to model processes) plays an important role in process mining. The BPMN 2.0 (Business Process Model and Notation) standard is widely used and allows to build conventional and understandable process models. In addition to the flat control flow perspective, subprocesses, data flows, resources can be integrated within one BPMN diagram. This makes BPMN very attractive for both process miners and business users, since the control flow perspective can be integrated with data and resource perspectives discovered from event logs. In this paper, we describe and justify robust control flow conversion algorithms, which provide the basis for more advanced BPMN-based discovery and conformance checking algorithms. Thus, on the basis of these conversion algorithms low-level models (such as Petri nets, causal nets and process trees) discovered from event logs using existing approaches can be represented in terms of BPMN. Moreover, we establish behavioral relations between Petri nets and BPMN models and use them to adopt existing conformance checking and performance analysis techniques in order to visualize conformance and performance information within a BPMN diagram. We believe that the results presented in this paper can be used for a wide variety of BPMN mining and conformance checking algorithms. We also provide metrics for the processes discovered before and after the conversion to BPMN structures. Cases for which conversion algorithms produce more compact or more complicated BPMN models in comparison with the initial models are identified.     

The ontological deficiencies of process modeling in practice

Business process modeling is widely regarded as one of the most popular forms of conceptual modeling. However, little is known about the capabilities and deficiencies of process modeling grammars and how existing deficiencies impact actual process modeling practice. This paper is a first contribution towards a theory-driven, exploratory empirical investigation of the ontological deficiencies of process modeling with the industry standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). We perform an analysis of BPMN using a theory of ontological expressiveness. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with BPMN adopters we explore empirically the actual use of this grammar. Nine ontological deficiencies related to the practice of modeling with BPMN are identified, for example, the capture of business rules and the specification of process decompositions. We also uncover five contextual factors that impact on the use of process modeling grammars, such as tool support and modeling conventions. We discuss implications for research and practice, highlighting the need for consideration of representational issues and contextual factors in decisions relating to BPMN adoption in organizations.     

Knowledge-based system for collaborative process specification

This paper presents an ontology-based approach for the design of a collaborative business process model (CBP). This CBP is considered as a specification of needs in order to build a collaboration information system (CIS) for a network of organizations. The study is a part of a model-driven engineering approach of the CIS in a specific enterprise interoperability framework that will be summarised. An adaptation of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is used to represent the CBP model. We develop a knowledge-based system (KbS) which is composed of three main parts: knowledge gathering, knowledge representation and reasoning, and collaborative business process modelling. The first part starts from a high abstraction level where knowledge from business partners is captured. A collaboration ontology is defined in order to provide a structure to store and use the knowledge captured. In parallel, we try to reuse generic existing knowledge about business processes from the MIT Process Handbook repository. This results in a collaboration process ontology that is also described. A set of rules is defined in order to extract knowledge about fragments of the CBP model from the two previous ontologies. These fragments are finally assembled in the third part of the KbS. A prototype of the KbS has been developed in order to implement and support this approach. The prototype is a computer-aided design tool of the CBP. In this paper, we will present the theoretical aspects of each part of this KbS as well as the tools that we developed and used in order to support its functionalities.     

Caterpillar: A business process execution engine on the Ethereum blockchain

Blockchain platforms, such as Ethereum, allow a set of actors to maintain a ledger of transactions without relying on a central authority and to deploy programs, called smart contracts, that are executed whenever certain transactions occur. These features can be used as basic building blocks for executing collaborative business processes between mutually untrusting parties. However, implementing business processes using the low-level primitives provided by blockchain platforms is cumbersome and error-prone. In contrast, established business process management systems (BPMSs), such as those based on the standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), provide convenient abstractions for rapid development of process-oriented applications. This article demonstrates how to combine the advantages of a BPMS with those of a blockchain platform. The article introduces a blockchain-based BPMN execution engine, named Caterpillar. Like any BPMN execution engine, Caterpillar supports the creation of instances of a process model and allows users to monitor the state of process instances and to execute tasks thereof. The specificity of Caterpillar is that the state of each process instance is maintained on the (Ethereum) blockchain and the workflow routing is performed by smart contracts generated by a BPMN-to-Solidity compiler. The Caterpillar compiler supports a large array of BPMN constructs, including subprocesses, multiple-instance activities, and event handlers. The paper describes the architecture of Caterpillar and the interfaces it provides to support the monitoring of process instances, the allocation and execution of work items, and the execution of service tasks.     

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。     

分离业务规则和过程流的业务过程模型研究

针对动态环境中业务逻辑的不断变化,通过业务规则和过程流分别描述业务过程中的易变和相对稳定业务逻辑,构建了业务过程模型BPM4DBL（Business Process Model for Dynamic Business Logic）。模型引入了活动、规则和事件元素,定义了分离业务规则和过程流的元组表达,并且给出了业务规则和过程流之间的耦合策略。最后,给出了一个BPM4DBL的具体应用实例。     

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.     

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。     

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.