Conference Paper

Goal-Oriented Autonomic Process Modeling and Execution for Next Generation Networks

Authors:
  • Whitestein Technologies AG, Switzerland
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Abstract

The effective modeling, execution and maintenance of business and operations processes, such as those described by the eTOM process framework, is of utmost importance to Telecom organizations, especially those transitioning toward NGN infrastructure. Many Business Process Management Systems, BPMS, available today however are significantly restricted in their support for intuitive and expressive process models, run-time process agility and rapid process adaptation to cope with changing business and operational conditions. This paper discusses a means of mitigating these limitations with a highly expressive goal-oriented process management language, GO-BPMN, and innovative autonomic BPMS called LS/ABPM. Together, GO-BPMN and LS/ABPM offer an intuitive, business-driven path to creating directly executable goal-oriented process models whose structure encodes multiple degrees of freedom through the potential for late decision-making. Executing models can be structurally modified in real-time in response to autonomic feedback from underlying systems they are managing.

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... Im Folgenden werden insbesondere drei Ansätze näher betrachtet: Das ADEPT -Projekt von Jennings et al. [77], in dem in einem Multiagenten-System Geschäftsprozesse ausgeführt werden, und GO-BPMN von Whitestein Technologies [29], in dem über Ziel-Hierarchien verbundene Prozesse von Agenten verknüpft werden, sowie das konzeptionell ähnliche Go4Flex [15]. ...
... Whitestein Technologies 3 verfolgen mit Goal-oriented BPMN (GO-BPMN) einen Ansatz, bei dem Prozesse und Ziele verknüpft werden [29]. Die Arbeiten entstanden in Kooperation mit Daimler Crysler Research & Development [22]. ...
Thesis
For many years, multi-agent systems have been used as an abstraction for complex and distributed software systems, and have helped in modelling many programs in an understandable and intuitive way. However, fundamental problems of distributed systems often remain: The developer sees just one part of the program code, just one side of the interaction, but not the entirety of the system. In another field of distributed systems, for service-oriented architectures, business process diagrams are being used. Those have many abstractions in common with agents, and are thus well suited for modelling multi-agent systems as a whole. At the same time, agents constitute a powerful execution environment for those processes. This thesis will investigate the question, how multi-agent systems can be modelled holistically by means of business process diagrams, and how agents can be employed for their execution. To this end, we will establish meta-models for both, agents and processes, and describe a mapping specification, how process models can be unambiguously converted into accordant agent systems. This mapping is embedded into a method, combining it with other techniques, in order to simplify and accelerate the agent-oriented software development process. This method is further supported by a special process modelling tool, implementing the described mapping in different ways. Both the mapping and its implementations have been used successfully in a number of research projects.
... In GO-BPMN (Goal-oriented BPMN) by Calisti and Greenwood (2008), process models are combined with a goal-hierarchy and executed by agents. The authors highlight the high flexibility of the system, and the prospects of parallelisation, but they also write that testing the system is difficult due to possible side-effects of the processes regarding other goals (Burmeister et al., 2008). ...
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... In GO-BPMN (Goal-oriented BPMN), process models are combined with a goalhierarchy and executed by agents [12]. The authors highlight the high flexibility of the system, and the prospects of parallelisation, but they also write that testing the system is difficult due to possible side-effects of the processes regarding other goals [7]. ...
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... GO-BPMN [36][37][38] is another declarative language, designed as a Goal-Oriented extension for traditional BPMN. In GO-BPMN business processes are defined as a hierarchy of goals and sub-goals. ...
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... One main difference is that we use goals for functional and non-functional process aspects and hence make goals an integral conceptual element for the context and the behaviour perspective. i.e. the goal modelling is considered as starting point for the process definitions according to the goal-context method of developed by Daimler AG [3], which has also been implemented in a commercial tool [4]. ...
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... One main difference is that we use goals for functional and non-functional process aspects and hence make goals an integral conceptual element for the context and the behavior perspective. i.e. the goal modeling is considered as starting point for the process definitions according to the goalcontext method of developed by Daimler AG 5 , which has also been implemented in a commercial tool 6 . This tool also includes a goal-oriented language called GOBPMN. ...
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