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     

Utilizing enterprise systems for managing enterprise risks

Enterprise risk management is a critical concept in the current business environment that supports use of tools and processes directed toward monitoring and mitigating organizational risks. Many organizations have embraced enterprise systems (ESs) technology for improving organizational efficiency and effectiveness. ESs provide value by identifying opportunities in operations and assist in managing risks through context sensitive analyses by eliciting relevant information. This research investigates how ES data were transformed into knowledge by a hi-tech manufacturing firm from an ES implementation, and how this knowledge was used to manage risks by utilizing an ES data transformation model from existing literature. Findings indicate that the ES data transformation process resulted from knowledge-leveraging actions at both executive and operational levels. At the executive level, the use of business intelligence module in conjunction with cascades of balanced scorecards helped in assessing progress for achieving goals, and translated decisions into risk-eliminating actions at the operational level. An initial technology-push approach assisted in creating semantically rich representative process models by simulating risk scenarios, leading to a strategy-pull approach for deploying business strategies and decisions. A value assessment strategic model articulates the knowledge-leveraging processes combining human skills with ES tools to optimize enterprise risks.     

基于BPEL的业务流程管理系统架构的研究与应用

随着商业环境的日益复杂化,对企业流程的管理受到越来越多的重视,基于BPEL的流程组合方法得到了广泛的业界支持.首先研究了Web服务业务流程执行语言（web service business process execution language,WS-BPEL）的协议基础及关键技术,并给出了基于BPEL的业务流程管理系统的框架,着重介绍了业务流程执行引擎的结构,并结合一个应用实例分析了BPEL流程的执行过程.最后,提出了WS-BPEL技术目前还存在的问题以及今后的研究方向.     

On the adoption of blockchain for business process monitoring

Being the blockchain and distributed ledger technologies particularly suitable to create trusted environments where participants do not trust each other, business process management represents a proper setting in which these technologies can be adopted. In this direction, current research work primarily focuses on blockchain-oriented business process design, or on execution engines able to enact processes through smart contracts. Conversely, less attention has been paid to study if and how blockchains can be beneficial to business process monitoring. This work aims to fill this gap by (1) providing a reference architecture for enabling the adoption of blockchain technologies in business process monitoring solutions, (2) defining a set of relevant research challenges derived from this adoption, and (3) discussing the current approaches to address the aforementioned challenges.

     

A service-based architecture for dynamically reconfigurable workflows

In the last few years, business process management systems have been employed for handling information systems of ever increasing complexity. As a consequence, the adoption of modelling languages enabling smooth and seamless transitions among the various phases of the process lifecycle, the ability of exploiting coordination schema over distributed execution contexts and the support for dynamic evolution and reconfiguration have become software engineering issues of great importance. This paper proposes the use of PN-Engine, a decentralized Petri nets execution engine, as a business process enactment engine. PN-Engine, which is based on the Jini service architecture, supports the decentralized execution of process models specified as Petri nets (PNs) enhanced with modular constructs and offers suitable mechanisms for dealing with the aforementioned design issues. PN-Engine allows to deploy and enact a new version of an existing process model without requiring the stopping/removal of older instances that are still running. The paper presents a novel approach enabling a decentralized migration procedure where concurrent portions of older instances migrate asynchronously to the new process model. Advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated by means of an example concerning a workflow for a wine-production process.     

Model-based monitoring and policy enforcement of services

Runtime monitoring is necessary for continuous quality assurance of Web Services. Sensors are critical in runtime monitoring to capture the data and detect anomalies. However, sensors in current monitoring systems are usually manually instrumented or hard-coded in the program. It is expensive to implement, and inflexible to change at runtime. The paper extends our previous research on collaborative monitoring and proposes a model-based approach for automatic generating sensors and enforcing policies. Web Services standards WSDL and OWL-S are taken as the models of service interface, workflow, and semantic. Sensors are generated based on the models from two perspectives: (1) dependency analysis of the data, operations, and services with respect to the ontology model of domain concepts and usage context; (2) coverage strategies to decide the specific logic and paths to cover and the data to capture by the monitoring sensors. Policies are defined as a 3-tuple of type, subject and assertion sets and are specified using WS-Policy standards. They are associated to the sensors and enforced at runtime by the policy engine that interoperates with service execution engine to communicate runtime behavior information and verification results. Prototype system is implemented based on the Eclipse platform where sensors are implemented as the listeners to the process execution and instrumented into the middleware including the OWL-S execution engine and SOAP engine. Experiments show that the monitoring results in low overhead of the system performance, reduced effort and enhanced flexibility of sensor instrumentation.     

Decision-enabled dynamic process management for networked enterprises

Enterprises in today’s networked economy face numerous information management challenges, both from a process management perspective as well as a decision support perspective. While there have been significant relevant advances in the areas of business process management as well as decision sciences, several open research issues exist. In this paper, we highlight the following key challenges. First, current process modeling and management techniques lack in providing a seamless integration of decision models and tools in existing business processes, which is critical to achieve organizational objectives. Second, given the dynamic nature of business processes in networked enterprises, process management approaches that enable organizations to react to business process changes in an agile manner are required. Third, current state-of-the-art decision model management techniques are not particularly amenable to distributed settings in networked enterprises, which limits the sharing and reuse of models in different contexts, including their utility within managing business processes. In this paper, we present a framework for decision-enabled dynamic process management that addresses these challenges. The framework builds on computational formalisms, including the structured modeling paradigm for representing decision models, and hierarchical task networks from the artificial intelligence (AI) planning area for process modeling. Within the framework, interleaved process planning (modeling), execution and monitoring for dynamic process management throughout the process lifecycle is proposed. A service-oriented architecture combined with advances from the semantic Web field for model management support within business processes is proposed.     

Risk management during requirements

Risk management is project management for adults. This means the manager adopts an adult attitude toward things that might go wrong during the project, a marked difference from the prevailing can-do attitude. The risk manager is obliged to do some cannot-do thinking, to look problems - even potentially unsolvable ones - directly in the eye and acknowledge that they could come to pass. The risk-aware project manager will accept a lucky break if it should happen but refuses to include it in the plan. At the heart of risk management is a public, continuing process of risk identification. Some risks that will threaten your project are utterly unique to your situation, but others are not. Over some 10 years of conducting risk identification exercises in organizations, we have found five risks that are so ubiquitous that we have dubbed them core risks. We focus on the first two core risks and discuss risk management as part of the requirements process: intrinsic schedule flaws-estimates that are wrong (undoable) from day one, often based on nothing more than wishful thinking; and specification breakdown - failure to achieve stakeholder consensus on what to build.     

Petri net-based process monitoring: a workflow management system for process modelling and monitoring

Nowadays business process management is becoming a fundamental piece of many industrial processes. To manage the evolution and interactions between the business actions it is important to accurately model the steps to follow and the resources needed by a process. Workflows provide a way of describing the order of execution and the dependencies between the constituting activities of business processes. Workflow monitoring can help to improve and avoid delays in industrial environments where concurrent processes are carried out. In this article a new Petri net extension for modelling workflow activities together with their required resources is presented: resource-aware Petri nets (RAPN). An intelligent workflow management system for process monitoring and delay prediction is also introduced. Resource aware-Petri nets include time and resources within the classical Petri net workflow representation, facilitating the task of modelling and monitoring workflows. The workflow management system monitors the execution of workflows and detects possible delays using RAPN. In order to test this new approach, different services from a medical maintenance environment have been modelled and simulated.     

Automating correctness verification of artifact-centric business process models

ContextThe artifact-centric methodology has emerged as a new paradigm to support business process management over the last few years. This way, business processes are described from the point of view of the artifacts that are manipulated during the process.ObjectiveOne of the research challenges in this area is the verification of the correctness of this kind of business process models where the model is formed of various artifacts that interact among them.MethodIn this paper, we propose a fully automated approach for verifying correctness of artifact-centric business process models, taking into account that the state (lifecycle) and the values of each artifact (numerical data described by pre and postconditions) influence in the values and the state of the others. The lifecycles of the artifacts and the numerical data managed are modeled by using the Constraint Programming paradigm, an Artificial Intelligence technique.ResultsTwo correctness notions for artifact-centric business process models are distinguished (reachability and weak termination), and novel verification algorithms are developed to check them. The algorithms are complete: neither false positives nor false negatives are generated. Moreover, the algorithms offer precise diagnosis of the detected errors, indicating the execution causing the error where the lifecycle gets stuck.ConclusionTo the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first verification approach for artifact-centric business process models that integrates pre and postconditions, which define the behavior of the services, and numerical data verification when the model is formed of more than one artifact. The approach can detect errors not detectable with other approaches.     

How public conversation management integrated with local business process management

In order for enterprises to collaborate at the business-process level, they must deal with two kinds of processes: the public conversation processes specifying inter-enterprise document flows, and the private business processes specifying local workflows of document manipulation and other related tasks. The provisioning, interaction and integration of conversation management and business process management, have become the common interest of the e-business industry. In this paper we discuss the relationship and interaction between conversation management and business process management; point out the difference between public conversation processes (e.g. BPSS processes) and peer-conversation processes (e.g. BPEL4WS processes). We then illustrate our collaborative process management system that has functionally separated conversation manager and business process manager. The conversation manager is based on the ebXML BPSS standard; it is used for validating document exchange at run-time and for activating corresponding process tasks. We have also proposed the conversation model driven asynchronous task activation mechanism for interaction between a conversation process and the coupled business process dynamically. With this mechanism, generic APIs between the conversation manager and the business process manager can be easily defined and used by multiple plugged-in conversation managers.     

业务过程建模中冲突消解的研究

业务过程建模是整个工作流管理的基础,在工作流执行之前,需要对业务过程模型进行分析和检测,对含有冲突的模型进行冲突消解,以协助建模人员修改业务过程模型。介绍了冲突的体系结构,对近年来在冲突消解方面的研究进行论述,并提出了含有二级检测机制的冲突消解工具结构,为业务过程模型的分析提供依据。     

业务活动驱动系统体系结构执行研究

针对可执行体系结构研究中难以将业务体系结构的执行对应到系统体系结构的执行,并最终形成内在一致的执行体,提出了业务活动驱动系统体系结构执行的方法。该方法根据DoDAF中业务活动与系统功能多对多的关系,将业务活动用更详细的业务过程模型进行描述,并将过程模型中的行为单元对应到系统功能并触发该功能的执行。系统功能的执行将相应地触发一系列系统功能的执行,系统功能之间的系统数据交换将通过系统通信描述（SV-2）中的连接来实现,这样就建立起业务体系结构与系统体系结构之间的联系,并最终形成整个体系结构内在一致的执行体。该方法有效地解决了业务活动与系统功能之间多对多,无法形成内在一致的执行体问题,为体系结构的执行提供了一个明确、具体的可实施方案。     

A layered architecture for flexible Web service invocation

Web service composition is emerging as an interesting approach to integrate business applications and create intra‐organizational business processes. Single Web services are combined to create a complex Web service that will realize the process business logic. Once the process is created, it is executed by an orchestration engine that invokes individual Web services in the correct order. However, Web services composing the workflow sometimes become unavailable during the run‐time phase, blocking process execution. This paper describes an architecture that allows the flexible orchestration of business processes. With this approach, Web services composing the process can be automatically substituted with other compatible Web services during process execution. A methodology is defined to evaluate Web service compatibility based on interface matching, in order to select substitutable Web services. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于Internet工作流的复合Web服务框架

实现灵活方便的企业业务集成一直是信息领域的核心问题，也是B2B电子商务应用的关键．为此将Web服务和传统的工作流技术相结合，设计并实现了支持复合Web服务运行和管理的框架WSFlow．给出了WSFlow的总体结构，描述了其中的关键技术，包括Web服务与工作流活动的动态配置和绑定技术，复合Web服务流程的动态修改以及复合Web服务的运行监控等技术．     

基于Agent的虚拟企业体系结构设计

基于Agent平台提出了虚拟企业的体系结构,对体系结构中的分布式处理环境、移动Agent平台及其支撑服务、业务过程说明、注册和管理以及基于Agent的虚拟市场等进行了详细地介绍。     

一个基于持续消息的分布式工作流管理模型

提出了一种新的分布式结构,在这个结构中,排除了工作流系统对一个集中式数据库的依赖,而是用持续消息的方法将与过程执行有关的信息存储起来,使过程的执行是完全分布式的,并且每个节点都是各自独立的。采用这种方式能增强对错误的恢复能力以及构造系统的灵活性和扩展性。     

基于SOA和BPEL的业务流程管理研究与应用

针对当前软件系统开发中存在的系统和组件差异等问题,引入了面向服务的体系结构(SOA)的框架和业务过程执行语言(BPEL),给出了基于SOA和BPEL的业务流程管理框架,介绍了业务流程执行引擎的结构,并结合一个具体应用实例详细说明了BPEL流程的执行过程.     

Web Service Diagnoser Model for managing faults in web services

Reliability is an important criterion to facilitate extensive deployment of web service technology for commercial business applications. Run-time monitoring and fault management of web services are essential to ensure uninterrupted and continuous availability of web services. This paper presents WISDOM (Web Service Diagnoser Model) a generic architecture for detecting faults during execution of web services. Policies have been proposed to describe the intended behavior of web services and faulty behavior would be detected as deviations or inconsistencies with respect to the specified behavior. The model proposes the use of monitoring components in service registries and service providers to detect run-time faults during publishing, discovery, binding and execution of web services. An independent fault diagnoser is proposed to coordinate the individual monitoring components and also act as a repository for the specified web service policies. The proposed model has been tested with a sample web service application and the results obtained are presented.     

The design of intelligent workflow monitoring with agent technology

In recent years, workflow technology has been widely used in business process management. With the increased complexity, uncertainty and risks in business operations, workflow monitoring is gaining growing attention in business process controlling and supervision. However, monitoring functions provided in traditional workflow systems lack flexibility, and provide little support for managing complex and dynamical changes in business process. In this paper, we propose a novel workflow monitoring approach, in which various intelligent agents work together to perform flexible monitoring tasks in an autonomous and collaborative way. By using customized monitoring plan and proactive monitoring process, the workflow monitoring activities can be executed flexibly and efficiently. The application of intelligent agents for such flexible, adaptive and collaborative workflow monitoring is investigated through an intelligent monitoring system in securities trading.