Verena Geist

• Software Competence Center Hagenberg

Software documentation is a key asset in maintenance and evolution of software. Especially, the problem of outdated or lost documentation and lack of program understanding pose severe challenges and risks in industry. The plethora of different domain-specific requirements, business needs, and fast-moving technologies make it, however, difficult to...

Code completion is a very important feature of modern integrated development environments. Research has been done for years to improve code completion systems for general-purpose languages. However, only little literature can be found for (AI-based) code completion for domain specific languages (DSLs). A DSL is a special-purpose programming languag...

Architecture decision records (ADRs) have been proposed as a resource-efficient means for capturing architectural design decisions (ADDs), and have received attention not only from researchers but also from practitioners. We conducted a mining software repositories (MSR) study, in which we analyzed the use of ADRs in open source repositories at Git...

Temporal knowledge graphs allow to store process data in a natural way since they also model the time aspect. An example for such data are registration processes in the area of intellectual property protection. A common question in such settings is to predict the future behavior of a (yet unfinished) process. However, traditional process mining tec...

Purpose Knowledge- and communication-intensive domains still long for a better support of creativity that considers legal requirements, compliance rules and administrative tasks as well, because current systems focus either on knowledge representation or business process management. The purpose of this paper is to discuss our model of integrated kn...

Digitalization of knowledge work in communication-intensive domains such as intellectual property protection poses great challenges but also opportunities to improve today’s working environments. The legal domain is strongly characterized by knowledge work, whereby, despite a common legal framework, creativity of individual experts is decisive. Thi...

The main challenges are discussed together with the lessons learned from past and ongoing research along the development cycle of machine learning systems. This will be done by taking into account intrinsic conditions of nowadays deep learning models, data and software quality issues and human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) postulates, inclu...

Source code comments contain key information about the underlying software system. Many redocumentation approaches, however, cannot exploit this valuable source of information. This is mainly due to the fact that not all comments have the same goals and target audience and can therefore only be used selectively for redocumentation. Performing a req...

The main challenges along with lessons learned from ongoing research in the application of machine learning systems in practice are discussed, taking into account aspects of theoretical foundations, systems engineering, and human-centered AI postulates. The analysis outlines a fundamental theory-practice gap which superimposes the challenges of AI...

The OMG standard Systems Modeling Language (SysML) has been on the market for about thirteen years. This standard is an extended subset of UML providing a graphical modeling language for designing complex systems by considering software as well as hardware parts. Over the period of thirteen years, many publications have covered various aspects of S...

Due to different aspects, such as data, functionality, communication, and interaction, modelling information systems is a complex and challenging task. Each aspect in general calls for its own model, which has to be integrated in the overall system model. In this paper, we present the Hagenberg Business Process Modelling (H-BPM) method as a novel a...

Business process management (BPM) provides many benefits for a company including productivity, efficiency, compliance, risk management, consistency, repeatability, and measurability. Many of these aspects also ensure and improve functional safety, privacy, and security in process execution. However, managed business processes lack flexibility; ie,...

Processes are the core of an enterprise and describe the interconnection of tasks in daily business. The purpose of this article is to present methods and tools that enable extraction of processes based on the concept of process analysis/mining. This valuable knowledge about the current processes of a company can serve as the starting point for per...

This book constitutes revised and peer reviewed contributions from the Research part of the ERP Future 2016 conference held in Hagenberg, Austria, in November 2016. The ERP Future Research conference is set up as a platform for scientific discussion on enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, business intelligence (BI) systems, business process...

Business Process customization is an active research area in the process management field, dealing with variations/commonalities among processes of a given process family and runtime adaptations of single process instances. Many theoretical approaches have been suggested in the last years; however, practical implementations are rare and limited in...

In this chapter, we give an overview of the different models, which extend the core process description of common business process modelling languages. We describe how the models are related to each other and how they can work together—the core process description language, the actor model, the user interaction (dialogue) model, the data model, and...

An important issue concerning system architectures is how to guarantee that the executable behaviour of a particular model is exactly the same as intended by the system architect. Graphical notations seem intuitive enough to be well understood almost at first sight. However, they typically lack the precise mathematical basis that is required to ren...

In most BPMLs, modality is implicitly expressed through the structure of the process flow, so all activities are (tacitly) obligatory, and whenever something should be optional, a gateway is used to split the process flow, which offers the possibility to execute the activity or to do nothing. In this chapter, we present a deontic classification of...

Several BPMLs that primarily express the flow of activities provide only limited support for actor modelling. For example, BPMN and UML activity diagrams suggest rigid swimlane concepts to model roles and actors. Thus, in this chapter, we present a task-based approach for actor modelling, extended with deontic logic and speech act theory. An extens...

In this chapter, we propose a generalised event concept for business process modelling which can increase flexibility for users in matters of communication, but also increases the number of different communication patterns for cross-organisation communication. We propose a combination of event trigger properties and different types of event pools....

In this chapter, we summarise our work on the Hagenberg Business Process Modelling (H-BPM) method, a novel and homogeneous integration framework for business process modelling based on a rigorous semantics for BPMN 2.0 process diagrams, which also includes indispensable extensions in the form of horizontal refinements. The proposed extensions addre...

In this chapter, we propose a typed approach to business process specification that supports the integration of workflow definition and dialogue programming and is also open to business process modelling. The resulting key artefact is called workflow chart and still models the control flow of business processes but puts more emphasis on user intera...

Compared to business processes in other business domains, dynamic workflows in disaster management need a rather rigid allocation of work to actors. The work schedule must conform to available resources and their skills. Moreover, to ensure that each actor is able to quickly start working and to complete pieces of work rapidly, work must be distrib...

This book presents a proposal for designing business process management (BPM) systems that comprise much more than just process modelling. Based on a purified Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) variant, the authors present proposals for several important issues in BPM that have not been adequately considered in the BPMN 2.0 standard. It foc...

Resource-efficient business processes are a key asset of an organization in a competitive market environment. Current efforts address this issue either at the process schema level by specifying an optimal sequence of process activities or at the process instance level by optimizing resource utilization within a single running process instance. In t...

Modelling business processes in general is a complex endeavour, as many different aspects such as the control flow, the management of data, event and message handling, actors and interaction, exception handling, etc. have to be taken into account, all of which require different models. This paper focuses on the horizontal integration of models for...

In this chapter we present an Abstract State Machine (ASM) ground model designed to rigorously specify the semantics of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) Process Diagrams, based on the BPMN 2.0 standard [95]. However, we deviate from the standard in several points, having identified several inconsistencies as well as ambiguities there. Mor...

In this chapter, we discuss the advantages and possible uses of a formal semantic model of a business process modelling language like the one presented in Chap. 4.

While we deem the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0 standard an important milestone in the evolution of business process modelling , we found numerous ambiguities, gaps and inconsistencies in the semantics described there (even though it claims that “the BPMN execution semantics have been fully formalized” (in version 2.0) [95, p. 10])...

This section provides an overview of related work concerning established approaches for business process modelling , formal representations of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and the suitability of BPMN for business process modelling regarding gaps and limitations.

In this chapter we propose an approach for stepwise refinement of the rigorous semantics for Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) Process Diagrams presented in Chap. 4. The suggested approach hence fills the gap between an Abstract State Machine (ASM) ground model and a common workflow engine, such as Red Hat JBoss [109], Activiti [5], Bonita...

In this chapter, we discuss our approach, including the changes we propose for the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) . We further discuss future research work on several extensions to the core language which targets business process diagrams and primarily expresses the flow of activities.

The semantic model for the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0 presented in Chap. 4 deviates from the OMG’s standard in several places. In this chapter, we discuss and justify those deviations. Furthermore, we discuss miscellaneous other features of BPMN 2.0 as it is and make further suggestions for improvements. A detailed specification...

Efficient business processes are a critical success factor for organizations in a competitive market environment. One of the key potentials to increase efficiency of business processes is the optimization of resource utilization. The contribution of this paper is a novel approach for combining activities across running process instances to optimize...

[Context and motivation] The understandability of formal specifications is often considered as one of the main factors that limit the employment of formal methods in industrial applications. [Question/problem] Two reasons account for this issue: intricate notations and a coarse style of writing specifications. [Principal ideas/results] In this pape...

Purpose – A major problem of business process modelling languages that primarily express the flow of activities is the limited support for actor modelling provided by rigid swimlane concepts. Thus, the aim of this work is to present a general approach for actor modelling in business processes that supports different layers of abstraction, thereby i...

In this paper we represent a workflow management system architecture that realizes a sweet spot between the robustness of a centralized master workflow management enactment service and the flexibility of distributed disconnected workflow management services. The architecture emerged in a concrete scenario with the requirement that traveling busines...

We discuss ambiguities and inconsistencies in the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0 standard regarding the semantics of event-based gateways, and instantiating event-based gateways in particular. We suggest to use instantiating parallel event-based gateways to model asynchronous process behaviour and to clarify the BPMN standard accord...

Workflow charts are a novel way to describe business processes and a way of putting more emphasis on the human-computer interaction. They introduce a typed approach to workflow specification in order to improve flexibility in business process technology by proposing a concept for integrating workflow definition and dialogue programming, being also...

We suggest formalising Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and the Abstract State Machine (ASM) method. We describe the benefits of our approach as well as the necessary prerequisites. We argue that such a formalisation will lead to a clearer understanding of the proces...

The different views and modeling techniques of both the business analysts and software developers are a common problem in business process modeling. Various modeling approaches result in communication problems, as well as redundancies and inconsistencies in system documentation. Thus, when modeling process-oriented enterprise applications seamless...

A drawback of many business process modelling languages (BPMLs) is that modalities are implicitly expressed through the structure of the process flow. All activities are implicitly mandatory and whenever something should be optional, the process flow is split to offer the possibility to execute the activity or to do nothing. This implies that the d...

IT service management represents systematic approaches to the operations and maintenance of IT applications and IT infrastructure. The awareness of the importance of IT service management for the success of organizational IT projects and initiatives increases continuously in industry and research. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together r...

In this paper we propose a typed approach to business process specification based on typed workflow charts. These can be exploited as a domain-specific programming language and facilitate tight integration between workflow definition and system dialogue programming. The approach also supports the integration of business process modeling and busines...

In recent years several new modeling approaches have been published to cope with the increasing complexity of software systems. Thereby model integration was widely neglected, which led to heterogeneous modeling approaches. In this work we define the basic modeling terms and compare research projects in the domain of modeling and model integration....

Modeling process-oriented enterprise applications asks for combining business process modeling with user interaction and data modeling. Current business process management (BPM) and workflow technologies, however, are neither integrated with user dialogs nor offer an appropriate data model. This paper describes a solution to these shortcomings an i...

Developing process-oriented enterprise systems not only asks for Business Process Management (BPM) but also for an appropriate user interface and data model. Current BPM and workflow technologies are neither integrated with user dialogs nor offer an appropriate data model. This paper describes a novel integrated framework for modeling process-orien...