Event tunnel: exploring event-driven business processes

Event-based systems monitor business processes in real time. The event-tunnel visualization sees the stream of events captured from such systems as a cylindrical tunnel. The tunnel allows for back-tracing business incidents and exploring event patterns' root causes. The authors couple this visualization with tools that let users search for relevant events within a data repository.     

Event correlation for process discovery from web service interaction logs

Understanding, analyzing, and ultimately improving business processes is a goal of enterprises today. These tasks are challenging as business processes in modern enterprises are implemented over several applications and Web services, and the information about process execution is scattered across several data sources. Understanding modern business processes entails identifying the correlation between events in data sources in the context of business processes (event correlation is the process of finding relationships between events that belong to the same process execution instance). In this paper, we investigate the problem of event correlation for business processes that are realized through the interactions of a set of Web services. We identify various ways in which process-related events could be correlated as well as investigate the problem of discovering event correlation (semi-) automatically from service interaction logs. We introduce the concept of process view to represent the process resulting from a certain way of event correlation and that of process space referring to the set of possible process views over process events. Event correlation is a challenging problem as there are various ways in which process events could be correlated, and in many cases, it is subjective. Exploring all the possibilities of correlations is computationally expensive, and only some of the correlated event sets result in process views that are interesting. We propose efficient algorithms and heuristics to identify correlated event sets that lead potentially to interesting process views. To account for its subjectivity, we have designed the event correlation discovery process to be interactive and enable users to guide it toward process views of their interest and organize the discovered process views into a process map that allows users to effectively navigate through the process space and identify the ones of interest. We report on experiments performed on both synthetic and real-world datasets that show the viability and efficiency of the approach.     

A formal representation for context-aware business processes

A business process is a set of activities performed in a coordinated manner within an organizational and technical environment that is aimed toward a business goal. The flexibility of a process is related to an understanding of the unexpected events that occur when people, systems and resources interact and require adjustments. Thus, business processes must be designed to respond to information about different events and their specificity. This information defines what the literature calls “context”. To broaden the perception of context in the case of a business process, this work proposes an approach to characterize the context of a business process activity in a given domain through conceptual models structured in layers. A case study was conducted to evaluate the proposal, which provided evidence of the applicability of the model.     

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.     

Service integrators in business networks—the importance of relationship values

To realise the potentials of CRM (customer relationship management), relationship-specific processes need to be designed and implemented in companies. This is all the more important and complicated in business networks where two or more actors collaborate to serve the customers. A good collaboration within business networks is the basis for understanding the customer process and identifying customer needs. But, even in these days of customer orientation, transaction orientation is still a matter of strong interest, and the following questions remain to be answered: What is the difference between relationship-oriented processes and transaction-oriented processes, and how can relationship-oriented processes be designed for a business network? The authors give first answers to both questions by using a systematic, goal-oriented specialisation of generic actions. To give an example, one relationship-oriented process will be designed and specified for a certain customer process in the course of this paper.     

Modeling and Managing Interactions among Business Processes

Most workflow management systems (WfMSs) only support the separate andindependent execution of business processes. However, processes often needto interact with each other, in order to synchronize the execution of theiractivities, to exchange process data, to request execution of services, orto notify progresses in process execution. Recent market trends also raisethe need for cooperation and interaction between processes executed in differentorganizations, posing additional challenges. In fact, in order to reduce costsand provide better services, companies are pushed to increase cooperation and toform virtual enterprises, where business processes span across organizationalboundaries and are composed of cooperating workflows executed in differentorganizations. Workflow interaction in a cross-organizational environment iscomplicated by the heterogeneity of workflow management platforms on top ofwhich workflows are defined and executed and by the different and possiblycompeting business policies and business goals that drive process executionin each organization.In this paper we propose a model and system that enable interactionbetween workflows executed in the same or in different organizations. Weextend traditional workflow models by allowing workflows to publish andsubscribe to events, and by enabling the definition of points in the processexecution where events should be sent or received. Event notifications aremanaged by a suitable event service that is capable of filtering andcorrelating events, and of dispatching them to the appropriate targetworkflow instances. The extended model can be easily mapped onto anyworkflow model, since event specific constructs can be specified by means ofordinary workflow activities, for which we provide the implementation. Inaddition, the event service is easily portable to different platforms, anddoes not require integration with the WfMS that supports the cooperatingworkflows. Therefore, the proposed approach is applicable in virtually anyenvironment and is independent on the specific platform adopted     

Interoperable enterprise systems: Principles, concepts, and methods

Interoperable enterprise systems (be they supply chains, extended enterprises, or any form of virtual organizations) must be designed, controlled, and appraised from a holistic and systemic point of view. Systems interoperability is a key to enterprise integration, which recommends that the IT architecture and infrastructure be aligned with business process organization and control, themselves designed according to a strategic view expressed in an enterprise architecture. The paper discusses architectures and methods to build interoperable enterprise systems, advocating a mixed service and process orientation, to support synchronous and/or asynchronous operations, both at the business level (business events, business services, business processes) and at the application level (workflow, IT and Web services, application programs).     

Assessing event correlation in non-process-aware information systems

Many present-day companies carry out a huge amount of daily operations through the use of their information systems without ever having done their own enterprise modeling. Business process mining is a well-proven solution which is used to discover the underlying business process models that are supported by existing information systems. Business process discovery techniques employ event logs as input, which are recorded by process-aware information systems. However, a wide variety of traditional information systems do not have any in-built mechanisms with which to collect events (representing the execution of business activities). Various mechanisms with which to collect events from non-process-aware information systems have been proposed in order to enable the application of process mining techniques to traditional information systems. Unfortunately, since business processes supported by traditional information systems are implicitly defined, correlating events into the appropriate process instance is not trivial. This challenge is known as the event correlation problem. This paper presents an adaptation of an existing event correlation algorithm and incorporates it into a technique in order to collect event logs from the execution of traditional information systems. The technique first instruments the source code to collect events together with some candidate correlation attributes. Based on several well-known design patterns, the technique provides a set of guidelines to support experts when instrumenting the source code. The event correlation algorithm is subsequently applied to the data set of events to discover the best correlation conditions, which are then used to create event logs. The technique has been semi-automated to facilitate its validation through an industrial case study involving a writer management system and a healthcare evaluation system. The study demonstrates that the technique is able to discover an appropriate correlation set and obtain well-formed event logs, thus enabling business process mining techniques to be applied to traditional information systems.     

Business information modeling for process integration in the mold making industry

Driven by industrial needs and enabled by the latest information technology, enterprise integration has rapidly shifted from information integration to process integration for performance excellence in the entire business process. This paper reports on the modeling of a business information model which enables mold making companies to achieve business process integration. The needs of process integration in mold making companies are first highlighted. Typical mold making business processes are analyzed and four critical business processes to be integrated are identified. Further, a process-oriented business information model is proposed, which associates business information entities to meet the needs of all business processes. Based on the model, the integration of four critical business processes is investigated, which enables seamless information flows to streamline the business processes, maximize information sharing across the business processes and achieve the automation and concurrency of the business processes. Finally, the implementation and benefits to industry of the system derived from the developed information model is presented.     

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.     

Do activity lifecycles affect the validity of a business rule in a business process?

Traditional process mining techniques offer limited possibilities to analyze business processes working in low-predictable and dynamic environments. Recently, to close this gap, declarative process models have been introduced to represent process mining results since they allow for describing complex behaviors as a compact set of business rules. However, in this context, activities of a business process are still considered as atomic/instantaneous events. This is a strong limitation for these approaches because often, in realistic environments, process activities are not instantaneous but executed across a time interval and pass through a sequence of states of a lifecycle. This paper investigates how the existing techniques for the discovery of declarative process models can be adapted when the business process under analysis contains non-atomic activities. In particular, we base our proposed approach on the use of discriminative rule mining to determine how the characteristics of the activity lifecycles in a business process influence the validity of a business rule in that process. The approach has been implemented as a plug-in of the process mining tool ProM and validated on synthetic logs and on a real-life log recorded by an incident and problem management system called VINST in use at Volvo IT Belgium.     

Business alignment: using process mining as a tool for Delta analysis and conformance testing

Increasingly, business processes are being controlled and/or monitored by information systems. As a result, many business processes leave their “footprints” in transactional information systems, i.e., business events are recorded in so-called event logs. Process mining aims at improving this by providing techniques and tools for discovering process, control, data, organizational, and social structures from event logs, i.e., the basic idea of process mining is to diagnose business processes by mining event logs for knowledge. In this paper we focus on the potential use of process mining for measuring business alignment, i.e., comparing the real behavior of an information system or its users with the intended or expected behavior. We identify two ways to create and/or maintain the fit between business processes and supporting information systems: Delta analysis and conformance testing. Delta analysis compares the discovered model (i.e., an abstraction derived from the actual process) with some predefined processes model (e.g., the workflow model or reference model used to configure the system). Conformance testing attempts to quantify the “fit” between the event log and some predefined processes model. In this paper, we show that Delta analysis and conformance testing can be used to analyze business alignment as long as the actual events are logged and users have some control over the process.

A conceptual framework for understanding business processes and business process modelling

It is increasingly common to describe organizations as sets of business processes that can be analysed and improved by approaches such as business process modelling. Successful business process modelling relies on an adequate view of the nature of business processes, but there is a surprising divergence of opinion about the nature of these processes. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to organize different views of business processes under four headings. It also aims at providing an integrated discussion of the different streams of thought, their strengths and limitations, within business process modelling. It argues that the multifaceted nature of business processes calls for pluralistic and multidisciplinary modelling approaches.     

How novices design business processes

Process modeling is an important design practice in organizational improvement projects. In this paper, we examine the design of business process diagrams in contexts where novice analysts only have basic design tools such as paper and pencils available, and little to no understanding of formalized modeling approaches. Based on a quasi-experimental study with 89 BPM students, we identify five distinct process design archetypes ranging from textual to hybrid and graphical representation forms. We examine the quality of the designs and identify which representation formats enable an analyst to articulate business rules, states, events, activities, temporal and geospatial information in a process model. We found that the quality of the process designs decreases with the increased use of graphics and that hybrid designs featuring appropriate text labels and abstract graphical forms appear well-suited to describe business processes. We further examine how process design preferences predict formalized process modeling ability. Our research has implications for practical process design work in industry as well as for academic curricula on process design.     

基于知识的可变业务流程建模模型

为满足虚拟企业业务流程经常调整的需求,需采用一种可变的业务流程建模模型,便于业务人员在不需IT人员干预的情况下能够对已有业务流程进行修改或重新搭建新的系统。提出了一种基于知识的可变业务流程建模模型,采用业务模板与规则知识库,通过对业务目标分析、检索业务模板,从而定制新的业务流程。在建模过程中使用规则引擎对规则进行校验。业务人员不需对已有业务流程进行大规模重建,提取相应模板进行组合配置即可。     

基于Artifact的流程设计平台

基于jBPM的业务流程是面向过程的,不方便业务人员对信息的提取、分析。所以,以数据为中心的流程管理技术就应运而生。Artifact是记录业务流程的数据实体,围绕Artifact的业务流程管理正在成为业务流程管理研究的一个热点。jBPM流程能够很好的描述业务流程,为其提供分析、实施的基础。把Artifact的业务流程管理技术和jBPM的业务流程管理技术结合在一起,可以为系统模型的设计和实现提供方便同时为代码自动生成提供参考基础,体现了敏捷开发的思想。     

协同业务过程的建模及正确性修正

由自底向上建模方法建立的协同业务过程中通常存在不一致,故对其进行正确性分析是确保其正确实施的重要手段.现有方法大多关注正确性检测,这使得协同业务过程的正确性分析过程复杂且耗时.而正确性修正方法能够避免正确性检测方法中存在的重复检测和调整,但这方面的研究较少,不能有效地应用于协同业务过程修正.为此,基于简单路径提出一种协同业务过程正确性修正方法.首先,在考虑活动同步及异步交互情况下,将部分正确协同业务过程行为抽象为完整的简单路径,并将其合并成核;然后,利用协调映射技术将核映射为修正业务过程,通过将所有的修正业务过程并发组合建立修正协同业务过程.修正协同业务过程符合协同业务过程的实际特征,且含有修正前协同业务过程中所有完整的轨迹,也未引入隐藏轨迹,从而避免了有效性确认.最后,通过实验与现有方法进行对比分析,结果表明：相对已有工作,在考虑协同业务过程实际特征的情况下,协同业务过程正确性修正方法能够更加有效地对协同业务过程进行正确性修正.     

Using multi-agent simulation and learning to design new businessprocesses

Business process modeling, analysis, and then redesign are the central task in the efforts of re-engineering business processes. Frequently reviewing and promptly changing business processes to adapt to new business environment is the key to maintain agility under the competitive global market. It is imperative to enhance the adaptability of business processes. This paper proposes a multi-agent information system based on Swarm, a multi-agent simulation platform, to simulate business processes and incorporate reinforcement learning to obtain better process adaptability. The resulting system, called BPSLS, is elaborated and evaluated by the order fulfilment process in supply chain networks     

An automated approach for merging business process fragments

In the field of business process management, adopting efficient building strategies can improve the quality of companies’ business processes. The reuse of existing business processes or even fragments of them is a practical approach to build complete business processes or coarser-grained process fragments. In the present paper, we deal with the merge of a set of business process fragments for the construction of new complete processes. Our merge mechanism relies on a particular path matrix, that we call gateway path matrix. We use gateway path matrices to represent business process fragments to systematically compose shared components with individual ones. Moreover, our approach ensures that the resulting business process fragments subsume the behavior of initial ones and allows for adding new execution scenarios while controlling undesirable ones. In fact, we detect newly generated behaviors, and alert process designers of undesirable ones through behavioral constraints. We provide extensive experimental results derived from an implementation of our approach applied on a well-known industrial library of business process fragments.