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Workflow resource patterns: Identification, representation and tool support
... As highlighted in Section 2.1, resource assignment determines conditions that an employee should fulfil to potentially perform an activity [13]. Resource assignment can be linked to the workflow resource patterns defined by Russell et al. [16]. In their work, Russell et al. [16] distinguish 43 patterns to express how resources are presented and used in processes. ...
... Resource assignment can be linked to the workflow resource patterns defined by Russell et al. [16]. In their work, Russell et al. [16] distinguish 43 patterns to express how resources are presented and used in processes. These patterns are subdivided into seven categories: creation, push, pull, detour, auto-start, visibility, and multiple resource patterns [16]. ...
... In their work, Russell et al. [16] distinguish 43 patterns to express how resources are presented and used in processes. These patterns are subdivided into seven categories: creation, push, pull, detour, auto-start, visibility, and multiple resource patterns [16]. Resource assignment can be related to the creation patterns [17]. ...
Knowing the availability of human resources for a business process is required, e.g., when allocating resources to work items, or when analyzing the process using a simulation model. In this respect, it should be taken into account that staff members are not permanently available and that they can be involved in multiple processes within the company. Consequently, it is far from trivial to specify their availability for the single process from, e.g., generic timetables. To this end, this paper presents a new method to automatically retrieve resource availability calendars from event logs containing process execution information. The retrieved resource availability calendars are the first to take into account (i) the temporal dimension of availability, i.e. the time of day at which a resource is available, and (ii) intermediate availability interruptions (e.g. due to a break). Empirical evaluation using synthetic data shows that the method’s key outputs closely resemble their equivalents in reality.
... Söderström et al [57] 2003 Papavassiliou and Mentzas [47] 2004 Momotko and Subieta [41] 2005 Grangel et al [21] Russell et al [51] Thom et al [60] 2006 ...
... Finally, the work in Russell et al [51] encompasses the typical behavioural view on business process modelling languages by adding a resource perspective. In order to present modelling patterns that involve the control flow dimension together with the resource one, the authors first present a rich description of workflow and resource concepts, including the relations that hold among them, which constitute a de-facto meta-model. ...
... Primary studies describe what a business process is all extend a meta-model with new concepts [24,49,9,6,38,62,47,51,4,7,18,32,35,58,59,50] Table 10: Why introducing meta-models? ...
Business process modelling languages typically enable the representation of business process models by employing (graphical) symbols. These symbols can vary depending upon the verbosity of the language, the modeling paradigm, the focus of the language, and so on. To make explicit the different constructs and rules employed by a specific language as well as bridge the gap across different languages, meta-models have been proposed in literature. These meta-models are a crucial source of knowledge on what state-of-the-art literature considers relevant to describe business processes. Moreover, the rapid growth of techniques and tools that aim at supporting all dimensions of business processes and not only its control flow perspective, as for instance data and organisational aspects, makes even more important to have a clear idea, already at the conceptual level, of the key process constructs. The goal of this work is to provide the first extensive systematic literature review (SLR) of business process meta-models. This SLR aims at answering research questions concerning: (i) the kind of meta-models proposed in literature; (ii) the recurring constructs they contain; (iii) their purposes; and (iv) their evaluations. Thirty-six papers were selected and evaluated against four research questions. The results indicate the existence of a reasonable body of work conducted in this specific area, but not a full maturity. In particular, while traditional paradigms towards business process modelling, and aspects related to the business process control flow seem to be well present, novel paradigms and aspects related to the organisational, data and goal-oriented aspects of business processes seem to be still under-investigated.
... The last type of response is especially important when exceptions occur in business processes in which human performers have important roles. It includes delegation, escalation, deallocation, and reallocation of work items (Russell, van der Aalst, Hofstede, & Edmond, 2005). ...
... Effective allocation of human resources can significantly affect the performance of business processes (Cabanillas et al., 2013;Huang, Lu, & Duan, 2011;Ly, Rinderle, Dadam, & Reichert, 2006;Wibisono, Nisafani, Bae, & Park, 2016), so it is becoming increasingly important in business process management. However, most existing studies have focused on the control-flow perspective and have ignored the humanresource perspective (Russell et al., 2005;Song & van der Aalst, 2008). ...
... As a result, human resources are often allocated to inappropriate tasks, especially when unexpected exceptions occur. Advanced behavioral requirements, such as escalation, delegation, reallocation, and deallocation, are identified to respond appropriately to those exceptional situations (Russell et al., 2005), but few approaches support these advanced behavioral requirements (Reichert & Weber, 2012;Russell et al., 2005). ...
A key capability of today's organizations is to flexibly and effectively react to unexpected events. A critical case of an unexpected event is sudden unavailability of human resources, which was not properly addressed by existing resource allocation approaches. This paper proposes a systematic approach that analyzes event logs to select suitable substitutes if the initial human resources become unavailable. The approach uses process mining and social network analysis to derive a metric called degree of substitution, which measures how much the work experiences of the human resources overlap, from the two perspectives: task execution and transfer of work. Along with the metric, suitable substitutes are also identified. A simulation demonstrates that the approach identifies suitable substitutes more effectively and accurately than existing allocation methods such as role‐based allocation or random allocation. The proposed approach will increase the effectiveness of dynamic allocation of human resources, especially in an exceptional situation.
... In [Ru05] werdendie Anforderungandie Zuordnung vonRessourcen zu denAktivitäten eines GP umfassendd argestellt. Zentralh ierbeii st dieZ uordnung derjenigen Personen, dieb erechtigts ind, eineb estimmteA ktivität zu bearbeiten (d.h.d ie potentiellen Bearbeiter). ...
... Zentralh ierbeii st dieZ uordnung derjenigen Personen, dieb erechtigts ind, eineb estimmteA ktivität zu bearbeiten (d.h.d ie potentiellen Bearbeiter). Fürs olcheB earbeiterzuordnungenw erdeni n [ Ru05] viele Anforderungen dargestellt,d ie in heutigen GP-Engines jedoch nur teilweiseu msetzbar sind.S oe rmöglichtd er IBMB usiness ProcessM anager [IB17] hierbeil ediglich dieV erwendungv on Gruppen, anstatt zusätzlich Rollen,Kompetenzen undAbteilungshierarchienanzubieten. Auch dieM enge derv erfügbaren Bearbeiterzuordnungeni st eingeschränkt.D iesbezüglich istinnaher Zukunftk eine Verbesserungzuerwarten.ImGegenteil, diem ächtigsten angebotenen Mechanismen( RoutingP olicies) wurden inzwischen als "Deprecated" Digitalisierung im Geschäftsprozessmanagement 288 (veraltet) gekennzeichnet [ IB17].B earbeiterzuordnungenm üssenz ukünftigz .B.m ittels eines Services oderJava-Scripts selbst programmiertw erden. ...
... AlsB asis fürd ie Modellierung vonB earbeiterzuordnungen musse ineG P-Engine ein Metamodell zurO rganisationsmodellierung( kurz:O rganisationsmodell) definieren. Dieses sollte entsprechend [Ru05] zumindest dieO bjekttypenG ruppen,R ollen, Kompetenzenu nd hierarchischeA bteilungsstrukturen enthalten,d enen Personen (Bearbeiter)z ugeordnetw erden. Wieb ereits erläutert, istd ies beih eutigenG P-Engines nichti mmer gegeben. ...
Der Beitrag untersucht das Verhältnis von Geschäftsprozessmanagement (GPM) und Digitalisierung, basierend auf Literaturrecherche und einem Workshop. Insbesondere wird in den Bereichen Modellierung und Automatisierung von Prozessen retrospektiv untersucht, welche Potentiale und Herausforderungen es dort bezüglich der Digitalisierung gibt, und wie diese von heutigen Werkzeugen bereits abgedeckt werden.
... It identifies the hierarchy of the organization within which the process will be executed. Russell et al. [6] introduced a set of Workflow Resource patterns (WRP) to capture the requirements for resource management such as representation and utilization in workflow environment [6]. Awad et al. [7] proposed an extension metamodel for BPMN to enable representation of resource assignment constraints using Object Constraints Language (OCL) [8] to WRP [6]. ...
... It identifies the hierarchy of the organization within which the process will be executed. Russell et al. [6] introduced a set of Workflow Resource patterns (WRP) to capture the requirements for resource management such as representation and utilization in workflow environment [6]. Awad et al. [7] proposed an extension metamodel for BPMN to enable representation of resource assignment constraints using Object Constraints Language (OCL) [8] to WRP [6]. ...
... Russell et al. [6] introduced a set of Workflow Resource patterns (WRP) to capture the requirements for resource management such as representation and utilization in workflow environment [6]. Awad et al. [7] proposed an extension metamodel for BPMN to enable representation of resource assignment constraints using Object Constraints Language (OCL) [8] to WRP [6]. We, in a previous work, discussed organizational structures, and resource assignment matrix as aspects of the organizational perspective in [ [9], [10]]. ...
Variability management of process models is a major challenge for Process-Aware Information Systems. Process model variants can be attributed to any of the following reasons: new technologies, governmental rules, organizational context or adoption of new standards. Current approaches to manage variants of process models address issues such as reducing the huge effort of modeling from scratch, preventing redundancy, and controlling inconsistency in process models. Although the effort to manage process model variants has been exerted, there are still limitations. Furthermore, existing approaches do not focus on variants that come from change in organizational perspective of process models. Organizational-driven variant management is an important area that still needs more study that we focus on in this paper. Object Life Cycle (OLC) is an important aspect that may change from an organization to another. This paper introduces an approach inspired by real life scenario to generate consistent process model variants that come from adaptations in the OLC.
... To make use of those frameworks, the gap between what is provided by execution engines and what is expected by monitoring frameworks has to be filled. In this paper, we propose a mapping approach that fills the gap between the activity lifecycle models supported by different process execution engines and the reference lifecycle model proposed by Russell et al.[19]and supported by the BP-MaaS monitoring framework[3], as an example monitoring framework, and two process execution engines: Activiti[17]and jBPM[6]. For each, we have studied the supported task lifecycle models of the engines, compared them to the reference lifecycle and identified the mapping. ...
... If the resource fails to execute the task failed, it can try to (restart) it again or (reallocate) to another resource. More details about this lifecycle could be found in the extended version of this paper[9].[19]2. ...
... This framework supports the activity lifecycle by capturing the activity states and implements a correlation mechanism between events.[10]presented a generic framework to monitor process instances from different process perspectives. They are using the lifecycle from[19]and defines the events as a points to be tracked by their monitoring system which carry information from different perspectives. Our work could complement their work as they are not focusing on the resource perspective in their implementation.[5]focused ...
Most of organizations try to ensure that their business processes are compliant with regulations and laws, so runtime monitoring of process compliance is considered to be of crucial importance. In this regard, there are several frameworks that enable the monitoring based on variants of event processing technologies. Most of these frameworks presume a rich activity lifecycle model for the execution of tasks. However, most of process execution engines support simpler lifecycle models. Thus, these frameworks fall short in monitoring compliance for such engines due to missing needed input events. The goal of this paper is to enable compliance monitoring for different process execution engines. First we propose a middleware layer that maps different execution engines' lifecycles states to a reference lifecycle model. Also, unmatched states will be derived from execution's engine states. Additionally, we implement compliance anti patterns to prove the feasibility of our approach.
... An additional aspect that should be assed (in modelling language grammars) includes ability to realize (i.e. model and implement) well established workflow patterns that are templates of actual real world business processes (Russell et al. 2005a(Russell et al. ,2005bHollingsworth 1995;Aalst et al. 2003). Since there are several information system modelling languages already exists, due rationale and justification is required to use it in EA practice (Venkatesan 2018). ...
... These flows typically happen in many real world business enterprises. Workflow patterns incorporate 43 control flow patterns (Aalst et al. 2003;Russell et al. 2006), 40 data patterns (Russell et al. 2005b) and 43 resource patterns (Russell et al. 2005a) . Scope and suitability of the modelling language can be determined by its ability to represent these workflow patterns. ...
"Model" based business processes management has been the key approach for modern business enterprises. It permits continuous monitoring of the performance and the outcome of the business process ensuring organisation agility. However providing computer based support to model based organization faces several obstacles. One primary issue is non-availability software technology that permit abstraction, encapsulation and refinement of business roles and tasks along process flow on to Information system models in the enterprise business context. Enterprise Architecture (EA) methods alleviate this problem to some extent by providing contextual basis for relating business processes and information system models to enable model based organization management. EA methods embrace process flow diagram of BPMN or use cases/activity diagrams of UML or agent interaction diagram of Agent Oriented Modelling Language, to abstract and depict business processes or equivalent modelling approach. This research determine various salient aspects of a modelling technology that in turn impart necessary automation for EA practice and modelling. This is accomplished by setting up an exploratory case study and identifying problem areas and correcting them. This work provides a very first account of this exploratory case study. Several focused works to follow based on the road map presented here. This work argues this might contribute to improved maturity in "scope and architecture" dimension of Luftman's SAMM.
... In response to this need, Cloud Computing offers an access on the fly to dynamically scalable resources according to process demand[5]. Moreover, existing work on business process resource perspective mainly studied human resources properties as well as their dependencies[18],[19]and have neglected nonhuman ones, particularly Cloud resources. In this paper, we are interested in Cloud resources which have two main features depending on their Cloud providers and process tenant needs: ...
... In related areas, there are some research efforts which need to be regarded. In[18], series of Workflow Resource Patterns were proposed to capture the various ways in which human resources are represented and utilized in workfows. However they do not consider non-human resources especially Cloud resources. ...
... According to the literature, several modeling languages are adopted to model ETL subprocesses. For example, Unified Modeling Language (UML 2.0) and the standard business process notation (BPMN 2.0) are the most popular ones and meet the set requirements (Russell et al. 2006(Russell et al. , 2005. Several comparisons have been enacted among these two languages but the majority of researchers have concluded that there is a remarkable similarity between them (Russell et al. 2006). ...
Currently, the blooming growth of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., has generated and is still generating a big amount of data, which can be regarded as a gold mine for business analysts and researchers where several insights that are useful and essential for effective decision making have to be provided. However, multiple problems and challenges affect the decisional support systems, especially at the level of the Extraction–Transformation–Loading processes. These processes are responsible for the selection, filtering and normalizing of data sources in order to obtain relevant decisions. As far as this research paper is concerned, we aim to focus on adapting the transformation phase with the MapReduce paradigm to process data in a distributed and parallel environment. Subsequently, we set forward a conceptual model of this second phase that is composed of several operations that handle NoSQL structure, which is suitable for Big Data storage. Finally, we implement through Talend for Big Data our new components, which help the designer apply selection, projection and joining operations on the extracted data from social media.
... Neste capítulo, um padrão de workflow é definido como uma estrutura recorrente de processo relacionada a alguma perspectiva de negócio (veja Figura 1.20). Exemplos de padrões de workflow incluem: controle de fluxo [Russell et al. 2006b], dados [Russell et al. 2005a], recursos [Russell et al. 2005b], exceção [Russell et al. 2006c], alteração de processos [Weber et al. 2008], interação de serviços [Barros et al. 2005a], padrões SOA [Comite 2006], atividades [Thom et al. 2009a]. Nesta seção estes padrões são revisados. ...
Resumo O gerenciamento de processos de negócio (BPM) proporciona não apenas a redução de custos, tempo, erros e redundância na execução dos processos, mas também maior controle sobre estes. Assim tem-se o incremento da qualidade dos processos, de seus resultados e da organização como um todo. A busca por maior padronização e eficiência na execução dos processos têm aumentado o interesse das organizações pela tecnologia de workflow. BPM vêm sendo utilizado em diversos domínios de aplicação, tais como o domínio da saúde, envolvendo processos que requerem sistemas de workflow com suporte à adaptação dinâmica e o domínio da robôtica e automação, onde os processos carecem de maior padronização. Neste capítulo são apresentados conceitos fundamentas sobre BPM e workflow. Em particular, é introduzida a notação para modelagem de processos de negócio (BPMN), além dos principais padrões de workflow existentes. O capítulo inclui ainda a discussão de tópicos sobre a aplicabilidade de BPM em processos da saúde e robótica. Abstract Business Process Management (BPM) allows not only the reduction of costs, time, errors and process replication, but mainly it increases the control over process execution. Therefore, both process execution and organization quality improves. Organizations have showed an increasing interest by the workflow technology due to their need for more standardization and efficiency in process execution. BPM has been applied in many application domains such as the health domain presenting processes which require dynamic adaptation and flexibility in their execution as well as the robotics and automation domains including processes that need more standardization. This chapter presents basic concepts on BPM and workflow. In particular, it introduces the business process modelling notation (BPMN) and core existent workflow patterns. Finally, the chapter discusses specific topics regarding the use of BPM in the health and robotics domain.
... These flows typically happen in many real world business enterprises. Workflow patterns incorporate 43 control flow patterns (Aalst et al. 2003;Russell et al. 2006), 40 data patterns (Russell et al. 2005b) and 43 resource patterns (Russell et al. 2005a) . Scope and suitability of the modelling language can be determined by its ability to represent these workflow patterns. ...
The main objective of this research work is to propose and analyze capabilities of agent technology based business information system development instead of object oriented or process based software development. This thesis argues model based reactive agent as the basic abstraction for modeling and implementing enterprise business information systems. The proposed agent based Information System (IS) modeling results in models of business requirements and software models that are ontologically natural as per Bunge-Wand-Weber criteria for information system modeling languages. Agent based models inherently encapsulate business role and their functionality along with norms of action (i.e. enforce rules of business association in all communication). It is shown agent based models are loosely coupled in behavioral and structural modeling dimensions providing desired software engineering characteristics to the resulting software system. Through a case study it is illustrated that agent based information systems are very intuitive to analyze, specify, design, and implement.
This research work is divided into four parts. The first part consists of a software modeling language proposal namely Agent Oriented Modeling Language (AOML) that is ontologically aligned with system requirements model. AOML models consist of structural, behavioral and grouping model diagrams (such as agent diagram, agent interaction diagram, agent organization diagram, agent state transition diagram and so on). Special architectural modeling primitives supported by AOML include “code migration” and loose coupling of interaction between agent components using
“speech acts”. AOML models are demonstrated to have capability to represent most of the control flow, data flow and resource flow of business model workflow patterns. A sample case study of the AOML modeling is demonstrated in a minimal prototyping environment (namely System Incorporating Versatile Autonomous Nodes (SIVAN)).
The second part proposes a software engineering methodology called as Agent System Engineering Method (ASEM). ASEM is used to transform business requirements all the way to implementation and deployment using agent technology specific taxonomy/ontology. This ontology is shown to have a natural mapping to requirements domain. ASEM has heuristics and guidelines (i.e. transformation rules) for arriving at models -that emphasis on stepwise refinement and syntactic continuity of model types and model diagrams across all life-cycle stages of software engineering.
The third part proposes method of realizing agent technology specific constructs in programming languages to enable realization of AOML models. This is done by creating a software framework called as Active Internet Application Framework (ACIAF). ACIAF leverages industrially matured programming language technologies like C#/.Net/Windows Communication Foundation on Microsoft Windows platform. ACIAF can also be implemented using WS-BPEL. This work carries out theoretical assessment of formal properties of WS-BPEL based ACIAF.
The fourth part consists of proposing novel application architectures using agent technology. This application architecture have application to areas such as Internet of Things (IoT) integration. This work demonstrates IoT integration application using speech act based middleware. This research conclude that agent technology based system development offers management level benefits to enterprise business modelers by permitting better business-IT alignment. Technically agent technology based system development offers more manageable software engineering experience from the point of view of modeling, development method, programming, and verification and validation in comparison with popular approaches like object oriented analysis and design or process aware system modeling. Syntactic continuity of agent model abstraction across modeling diagrams and also syntactic continuity of modeling diagrams across software life cycle stages obviate need for “model connectors” that are needed in object oriented technology. This technical capability in agent technology is shown to promote Business-Information Technology Alignment (BITA) in enterprises. This capability also demonstrated to provide more manageable and maintainable grid cell models for Zachman Framework.
In addition to these core contributions this research highlights or outlines the formal properties of agent based systems theoretically. One of the highlight is behavioral attributability and interpolatability of actions performed by a group of collaborating WS-BPEL based agents is discussed. Another possibility is checking relative and mutual consistency of stakeholder viewpoint models (expressed in agent oriented modeling language) is also highlighted.
This research work conclude agent based IS result in intuitive models that remain close to business terminology, provide better encapsulation of role and their responsibilities and ensure better business process model alignment compared to other IS development methods such as that of “class/object” oriented development. Therefore this research concludes agent based software technology deliver more benefits to all associated stakeholders of information system development and use.
... Service is the atomic unit of the service composition [19]; services are connected using the transition or call. There are 5 type of service composition basic control Patterns [21], [22], patterns are illustrated bellow for care rental system example i1 Pattern 1: sequence or serial pattern, the service is called after the execution of another service is completed, the service execution is depending on the execution of the previous service as it is shown in figure3. Figure 4: Service composition using parallel and sequence pattern. ...
... Both functional and non-functional requirements need to be considered when implementing workflow-based applications [1]. Workflow patterns for control-flow, data-flow, and organizational resources [2,3,4] can be used to elicit functional requirements, whereas security-related dependencies are specified in workflows as authorization policies and additional constraints on the execution of the various tasks. ...
Workflows specify collections of tasks that must be executed under the responsibility or supervision of human users. Workflow management systems and workflow-driven applications need to enforce security policies in the form of access control, specifying which users can execute which tasks, and authorization constraints, such as Separation of Duty, further restricting the execution of tasks at run-time. Enforcing these policies is crucial to avoid frauds and malicious use, but it may lead to situations where a workflow instance cannot be completed without the violation of the policy. The Workflow Satisfiability Problem (WSP) asks whether there exists an assignment of users to tasks in a workflow such that every task is executed and the policy is not violated. The WSP is inherently hard, but solutions to this problem have a practical application in reconciling business compliance and business continuity. Solutions to related problems, such as workflow resiliency (i.e., whether a workflow instance is still satisfiable even in the absence of users), are important to help in policy design. Several variations of the WSP and similar problems have been defined in the literature and there are many solution methods available. In this paper, we survey the work done on these problems in the past 20 years.
... We consider sub-processes as the target alloca-tion unit; however, it can also be used to allocate resources at the activity level or at the process level, as a whole. Inspired by workflow resource patters[22], three allocation types are considered: capability-based allocation, history-based allocation and role-based allocation. We proposed a multi-criteria approach in which various metrics are evaluated to incorporate the evaluation of the individual performance of the resources and their group performance through different criteria: fitting between resources capabilities and the expertise required to perform an activity, past performance (frequency, duration, quality and cost), and the current workload of each resource. ...
Team recommendation is a key and little-explored aspect within the area of business process management. The efficiency with which the team is conformed may influence the success of the process execution. The formation of work teams is often done manually, without a comparative analysis based on multiple criteria between the individual performance of the resources and their collective performance in different teams. In this article, we present a multi-criteria framework to allocate work teams dynamically. The framework considers four elements: (i) a resource request characterization, (ii) historical information on the process execution and expertise information, (iii) different metrics which calculate the suitability of the work teams taking into account both individual performance as well as collective performance of the resources, and (iv) a recommender system based on the Best Position Algorithm (BPA2) to obtain a ranking for the recommended work teams. A software development process was used to test the usefulness of our approach.
... Moreover, a task instance can have different states. Such states are general in different systems like Inactive, Suspended, Active (also named /Started [53] or /Running [54]) and Completed [52] (see Fig. 2.5). ...
Separation of concerns has long been considered an effective and efficient strategy to deal with complexity in information systems.One sort of concern, like security and privacy, crosses over other concerns in a system. Such concerns are called cross-cutting concerns.As a result, the realization of these concerns is scattered through the whole system, which makes their management difficult.
Aspect Orientation is a paradigm in information systems which aims to modularize cross-cutting concerns.This paradigm is well researched in the programming area, where many aspect-oriented programming languages have been developed, e.g., AspectJ.It has also been investigated in other areas, such as requirement engineering and service composition.In the Business Process Management (BPM) area, Aspect Oriented Business Process Modeling aims to specify how this modularization technique can support encapsulating cross-cutting concerns in process models.However, it is not clear how these models should be supported in the whole BPM lifecycle.In addition, the support for designing these models has only been limited to imperative process models that support rigid business processes.Neither has it been investigated how this modularization technique can be supported through declarative or hybrid models to support the separation of cross-cutting concerns for flexible business processes.
Therefore, this thesis investigates how aspect orientation can be supported over the whole BPM lifecycle using imperative aspect-oriented business process models. It also investigates how declarative and hybrid aspect-oriented business process models can support the separation of cross-cutting concerns in the BPM area.This thesis has been carried out following the design science framework, and the result is presented as a set of artifacts (in the form of constructs, models, methods, and instantiations) and empirical findings.
The artifacts support modeling, analysis, implementation/configuration, enactment, monitoring, adjustment, and mining cross-cutting concerns while supporting business processes using Business Process Management Systems. Thus, it covers the support for the management of these concerns over the whole BPM lifecycle. The use of these artifacts and their application shows that they can reduce the complexity of process models by separating different concerns.
... Resource patterns [18] are used to support expressing criteria in resource allocations. Business Activities is a Role-based access control (RBAC) [21] extension of Unified Modeling Language (UML) activity diagrams to define separation of duties and binding of duties between the activities of a process. ...
The trustworthiness of systems that support complex collaborative business processes is an emergent property. In order to address users’ trust concerns, trustworthiness requirements of software systems must be elicited and satisfied. The aim of this paper is to address the gap that exists between end-users’ trust concerns and the lack of implementation of proper trustworthiness requirements in software systems. We focus on the challenges of specifying trustworthiness requirements and integrating them into the software development process as business process models. This paper provides a conceptual model of our approach by extending Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) for integrating trustworthiness requirements. Our proposed approach explicitly considers the trustworthiness of individual components as part of the business process models. We use an application example from the health care domain to demonstrate our approach.
... A lot of work can be found in the literature on workflow definition and enactment (WMC, 2005;Mahmud et al., 2013;Russell et al., 2005). In (Jacob et al., 2012), the authors proposed a textual DSL for workflow definition that supports sequencing and iteration. ...
... Researches have been carried out to loosen the dependence on personal experiences for resource allocation, e.g. mining resource allocation rules (e.g.[3]), finding suitable resources for tasks iteratively(e.g.[5]), and analyzing resource patterns [7]. New directions are emerging on these work. ...
Workflow management is an important technology of business process management that links tasks and qualified resources as a bridge. Researches have been carried out to improve the resource allocation of workflow that is often performed manually and empirically either by mining resource allocation rules or by optimizing the resource allocation for tasks to achieve certain goals such as minimal cost or duration. None of these approaches can guarantee to give the suitable solution to resource allocators because of the dynamic natures of business process executions. In this paper we propose an approach, BNRR (Bayesian Network-based Resource Recommendation), to recommend the most proficient sets of resources for a business process based on event logs, which gives the allocators chances to find the most suitable solution. Our approach considers both the information about the resource dependency and the information about the resource capability. The approach can be applied to recommend resources either for a whole workflow or for an individual task. The approach is validated by experiments on real life data.
... Specific topics of investigation in this area are human resource allocation [9,10] and scheduling [16][17][18]. The workflow resource patterns [19,20] are often used as a benchmark for corresponding modeling concepts such as [8]. Some works consider cloud characteristics explicitly: S. Schulte et al. in [21,22] develop a platform that allow Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) to manage resource elasticity. ...
Cloud computing has become an important infrastructure for outsourcing service-based business processes in a multi-tenancy way. Configurable process models enable the sharing of a reference process among different tenants that can be customized according to specific needs. While concepts for specifying the control flow of such processes are well understood, there is a lack of support for cloud-specific resource configuration where different allocation alternatives need to be explicitly defined. In this paper, we address this research gap by extending configurable process models with the required configurable cloud resource allocation. Our proposal allows different tenants to customize the selection of the needed resources taking into account two important properties elasticity and shareability. Our prototypical implementation demonstrates the feasibility and the results of our experiments highlight the effectiveness of our approach.
... Workflow constraints initially were focused on control flow only [9]. Overtime, other types of workflow constraints added for other perspectives such as workflow resource pattern [7], exceptional handling constraints [5], and workflow data constraints [8]. As a result, Two nodes are independent in the resulted graph only if they are independent in the original graph different workflow runs can produce different provenance graphs with different set of processes based on the state of the data and order of processes that can fire a set of workflow constraints. ...
... In 2006 Russell put forward a revised version of workflow control-flow patterns [38]. Shortly after the proposal of controlflow pattern, other workflow patterns like workflow data pattern [39,40], workflow resource pattern [41,42] and workflow exception pattern [43,44] have also been identified. For more information about workflow patterns, refer to http://www.workflowpatterns.com/. ...
Business process verification is an important topic in business process management (BPM). The verification of standard UML Activity Diagram is not easy due to lack of mature tools. YAWL (yet another workflow language) has a formal semantics based on Petri net; verification of YAWL model seems easier than other modeling languages such as UML-AD. A series of mature verification tools has been released (Woflan, WofYAWL, ProM) based on YAWL to find structural errors, such as deadlocks in the model. These tools can be used for verifying UML-AD models if they can be transformed to YAWL models.
The most challenging problem is that some control-flow patterns in UML-AD can’t be transformed via an element-to-element mapping. To solve this problem we provide a control-flow pattern based method for transforming a UML-AD model to YAWL. We regard these patterns that need to be transformed as whole model segments, pick them out from the UML-AD model and transform the left part using an element-to-element mapping as well as an object flow transforming method. We subsequently transform the picked-out patterns via patterns-based transformation and combine all the transformed YAWL segments to a new YAWL net.
Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.2.1 [Requirements]: Requirements –Methodologies.
General Terms: Theory.
Introduction
Data-driven simulation allows the discovery of process simulation models from event logs. The generated model can be used to simulate changes in the process configuration and to evaluate the expected performance of the processes before they are executed. Currently, these what-if scenarios are defined and assessed manually by the analysts. Besides the complexity of finding a suitable scenario for a desired performance, existing approaches simulate scenarios based on flow and data patterns leaving aside a resource-based analysis. Resources are critical on the process performance since they carry out costs, time, and quality.
Methods
This paper proposes a method to automate the discovery of optimal resource allocations to improve the performance of simulated what-if scenarios. We describe a model for individual resource allocation only to activities they fit. Then, we present how what-if scenarios are generated based on preference and collaboration allocation policies. The optimal resource allocations are discovered based on a user-defined multi-objective optimization function.
Results and discussion
This method is integrated with a simulation environment to compare the trade-off in the performance of what-if scenarios when changing allocation policies. An experimental evaluation of multiple real-life and synthetic event logs shows that optimal resource allocations improve the simulation performance.
Declarative logic programming formalisms are well-suited to model various optimization and configuration problems. In particular, Answer Set Programming (ASP) systems have gained popularity, for example, to deal with scheduling problems present in several domains. The main goal of this paper is to devise a benchmark for ASP systems to assess their performance when dealing with complex and realistic resource allocation with objective optimization. To this end, we provide (i) a declarative and compact encoding of the resource allocation problem in ASP (compliant with the ASP Core-2 standard), (ii) a configurable ASP systems benchmark named BRANCH that is equipped with resource allocation instance generators that produce problem instances of different sizes with adjustable parameters (e.g., in terms of process complexity, organizational and temporal constraints), and (iii) an evaluation of four state-of-the-art ASP systems using BRANCH. This solid application-oriented benchmark serves the ASP community with a tool that leads to potential optimizations and improvements in encodings and further drives the development of ASP solvers. On the other hand, resource allocation is an important problem that still lacks adequate automated tool support in the context of Business Process Management (BPM). The ASP problem encoding, ready-to-use ASP systems and problem instance generators benefit the BPM community to tackle the problem at scale and mitigate the lack of openly available problem instance data.
The design and analysis of process models is a critical factor for organizational improvement across various industries. Thanks to its potential to enable common understanding and foster automation, process modeling is increasingly adopted in the healthcare sector. However, the complexity of the healthcare domain makes process modeling a challenging task, potentially explaining the modest uptake of process modeling standards like the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). In this paper, we identify common challenges of process modeling in healthcare, elicited from healthcare process modeling initiatives and supported by the literature. For each challenge, we present some BPMN best practices in the form of ready-to-use process fragments that guide the standard modeling of complex healthcare aspects. Also, we report the results of a first evaluation of the use and perceived usefulness of best practices conducted with junior experts in medicine and IT. We observed that the domain-specific process fragments help to capture healthcare aspects in detail and are perceived as a source of learning, turning out to be especially useful for modelers with a basic understanding of BPMN and the healthcare domain.
Smart contracts are a key component of today’s blockchains. They are critical in controlling decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO). However, smart contracts are not yet legally binding nor enforceable; this makes it difficult for businesses to adopt the DAO paradigm. Therefore, this study reviews existing Smart Contract Languages (SCL) and identifies properties that are critical to any future SCL for drafting legally binding contracts. This is achieved by conducting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of white- and grey literature published between 2015 and 2019. Using the SLR methodology, 45 Selected- and 28 Supporting Studies detailing 45 state-of-the-art SCLs are selected. Finally, 10 SCL properties that enable legally compliant DAOs are discovered, and specifications for developing SCLs are explored.
Current notations and languages do not emphasize the participation of users in business processes and consider them essentially as service providers. Moreover, they follow a centralized approach as all the interactions originate from or end in a business process; direct interactions between users cannot be represented. What is missing from this approach is that human work is cooperative, and that cooperation takes place through structured interactions called conversations. However, the problem of effectively integrating conversations and business processes is still open, and this chapter proposes a notation called POBPN (People-Oriented Business Process Notation) and a perspective, referred to as conversation-oriented perspective, for its solution.
Even though the extremely uncertain current global business environment requires organizations to change their business processes and organizational structures to adapt to their extremely uncertain and complex environments, existing methodology and system cannot support this problem. This paper presents a comprehensive simulation and redesign system to simulate business processes and organizational structure simultaneously and derive the most process-oriented organizational structure efficiently. The methodology and system suggested in this study can predict the effects of changing business processes and organizational structures through the simulation and derive appropriate and practical organizational structures that execute current processes efficiently through the genetic algorithm. Existing business process researches have the limitations that they rarely have considered the effects of organizational structure on the performance, and this study have outstanding academic contribution in solving the problem systematically using simulation and optimization techniques.
Recently, research on workflow activity patterns emerged in order to increase the reuse of recurring business functions (e.g., request for task execution, notification, approval and decision). While workflow patterns have been defined for several aspects related to process execution, recurrent business functions have been only partially addressed by existing work. Related to this challenge we proposed a set of seven workflow activity patterns in previous work. In this paper we report on the results of several case studies we performed in Brazilian and European companies in order to investigate how frequently the activity patterns occur in real-world process models. We further formalize the identified activity patterns using calculus. This formalization as well as our analysis results are applied in the development of a BPM tool fostering the reuse of business functions specifications.
Process-aware information systems (PAISs) are increasingly used to provide flexible support for business processes. The support given through a PAIS is greatly enhanced when it is able to provide accurate time predictions which is typically a very challenging task. Predictions should be (1) multi-dimensional and (2) not based on a single process instance. Furthermore, the prediction system should be able to (3) adapt to changing circumstances and (4) deal with multi-perspective declarative languages (e.g., models which consider time, resource, data and control flow perspectives). In this work, a novel approach for generating time predictions considering the aforementioned characteristics is proposed. For this, first, a multi-perspective constraint-based language is used to model the scenario. Thereafter, an optimized enactment plan (representing a potential execution alternative) is generated from such a model considering the current execution state of the process instances. Finally, predictions are performed by evaluating a desired function over this enactment plan. To evaluate the applicability of our approach in practical settings we apply it to a real process scenario. Despite the high complexity of the considered problems, results indicate that our approach produces a satisfactory number of good predictions in a reasonable time.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Enterprise and Organizational Modeling and Simulation, EOMAS 2016, held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in June 2016.
The 12 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions. They were organized in topical sections on formal approaches and human-centric approaches.
Business processes have become ubiquitous in industry today. They form the main ingredient of business process management. The two most prominent standardized languages to model business processes are Web Services Business Process Execution Language 2.0 (BPEL) and Business Process Model and Notation 2.0 (BPMN). Business process engines allow for automatic execution of business processes. There is a plethora of business process engines available, and thus, one has the agony of choice: which process engine fits the demands the best? The lack of objective, reproducible, and ascertained information about the quality of such process engines makes rational choices very difficult. This can lead to baseless and premature decisions that may result in higher long term costs. This work provides an effective and efficient benchmarking solution to reveal the necessary information to allow making rational decisions. The foundation comprises an abstraction layer for process engines that provides a uniform API to interact with any engine similarly and a benchmark language for process engines to represent benchmarks in a concise, self-contained, and interpretable domain-specific language. A benchmark framework for process engines performs benchmarks represented in this language on engines implementing the abstraction layer. The produced benchmark results are visualized and made available for decision makers via a public interactive dashboard. On top of that, the efficient benchmark framework uses virtual machines to improve test isolation and reduce “time to result” by snapshot restoration accepting a management overhead. Based on the gained experience, eight challenges faced in process engine benchmarking are identified, resulting in 21 process engine benchmarking. Results show that this approach is both effective and efficient. Effective because it covers four BPEL-based and another four BPMN-based benchmarks which cover half of the quality characteristics defined by the ISO/IEC 25010 product quality model. Efficient because it fully automates the benchmarking of process engines and can leverage virtualization for an even higher execution efficiency. With this approach, the barrier for creating good benchmarks is significantly lowered. This allows decision makers to consistently evaluate process engines and, thus, makes rational decisions for the corresponding selection possible.
Modeling and analysis of resource constraints in business process is becoming a challenging research topic. In fact, business process improvement requires rational handling of resource constraints at both design time and runtime. This paper presents a model-based DEVS “Discrete Event System Specification” for modeling, analysis and checking of resource constraints in business processes at runtime and at earlier stages of design. The proposed model is implemented in JAVADEVS using DEVS-Suite simulator. The main idea of this research is to model activities and resources as atomic DEVS models and make coupling between them to result a DEVS coupled model, where communication is made by message exchanging. The behavior of the overall model will be mastered by the functions of DEVS, which guarantee the concordance of constraints related to the resources.
In the context of business process management, the resources required by business processes, such as workshop staff, manufacturing machines, etc., tend to follow certain availability patterns, due to maintenance cycles, work shifts and other factors. Such availability patterns heavily influence the efficiency and effectiveness of enterprise resource management. Most existing process scheduling and resource management approaches tend to tune the process structure to seek better resource utilisation, yet neglect the constraints on resource availability. In this article, we investigate the scheduling of business process instances in accordance with resource availability patterns, to find out how enterprise resources can be rationally and sufficiently used. Three heuristic-based planning strategies are proposed to maximise the process instance throughput together with another strategy based on a genetic algorithm. The performance of these strategies has been evaluated by conducting experiments of different settings and analysing the strategy characteristics.
Process mining aims at discovering processes by extracting knowledge about their different perspectives from event logs. The resource perspective (or organisational perspective) deals, among others, with the assignment of resources to process activities. Mining in relation to this perspective aims to extract rules on resource assignments for the process activities. Prior research in this area is limited by the assumption that only one resource is responsible for each process activity and hence, collaborative activities are disregarded. In this paper, we leverage this assumption by developing a process mining approach that is able to discover team compositions for collaborative process activities from event logs. We evaluate our novel mining approach in terms of computational performance and practical applicability.
Provalets are mobile rule agents for rule-based data access, semantic processing, and inference analytics. They can be dynamically deployed as microservices from Maven repositories into standardized container environments such as OSGi, where they can be used via simple REST calls. The programming model supports rapid prototyping and reuse of Provalets components to build Linked Enterprise Data applications where the sensible corporate data is not transmitted outside the enterprise, but instead the Provalets providing data processing and knowledge inference capabilities are moved closer to the data.
Cloud environments are being increasingly used for deploying and executing business processes to provide a high level of performance with low operating cost. Nevertheless, due to the lack of an explicit and formal description of the resource perspective in the existing business processes, the correctness of Cloud resources management can not be verified. The aim of the present work is to offer a formal definition of the resource perspective in business processes as a step towards ensuring a correct and consistent Cloud resource allocation in business process modeling. Concretely, we propose a formalism based on the Event-B language for specifying Cloud resource allocation policies in business process models. This formal specification is used to formally validate the consistency of Cloud resource allocation for process modeling at design time, and to analyze and check its correctness according to user requirements and resource capabilities. In order to show its feasibility, our approach has been tested using a real use case study from an industrial partner.
This paper presents an intentional-based modelling method aimed to support the analysis, the diagnosis and innovations for socio-technical ecosystems. Understanding and improving socio-technical ecosystems is still indeed a major challenge in the information systems domain. Current information systems’ methods do not consider the particularities of socio-technical ecosystems where breakthrough innovation is not always possible. The proposed method called ADInnov aims at guiding a continuous innovation cycle in socio-technical ecosystems by focusing on the resolution of their blocking points. It combines different user-centred techniques such as interviews, serious games or storyboarding. The method, represented with the MAP formalism, results from the lessons learned in a healthcare domain project (InnoServ). Through an empirical study, project managers evaluated the method appropriateness.
There is a common consensus on the role that social technologies could play in improving business process management. However several challenges continue to undermine this role. In this paper we discuss a specific challenge, which is the lack of formalization to describe cloud resources used by business processes. Building upon our previous work on social business processes we develop a framework that provides a semantic description of cloud resources, strategies to ensure their correct use based on this description, as well as a set of social relations connecting them. Thereby, this framework helps to guarantee a free-of-conflict resource allocation during business process execution. To illustrate our framework doability, an extension of Signavio process editor is developed using a real use case from an industrial partner.
A fundamental challenge for enterprises is to ensure compliance of their business processes with imposed compliance rules stemming from various sources, e.g., corporate guidelines, best practices, standards, and laws. In general, a compliance rule may refer to multiple process perspectives including control flow, time, data, resources, and interactions with business partners. On one hand, compliance rules should be comprehensible for domain experts who must define, verify, and apply them. On the other, these rules should have a precise semantics to avoid ambiguities and enable their automated processing. Providing a visual language is advantageous in this context as it allows hiding formal details and offering an intuitive way of modeling the compliance rules. However, existing visual languages for compliance rule modeling have focused on the control flow perspective so far, but lack proper support for the other process perspectives. To remedy this drawback, this paper introduces the extended Compliance Rule Graph language, which enables the visual modeling of compliance rules with the support of multiple perspectives. Overall, this language will foster the modeling and verification of compliance rules in practice.
In order to ensure the correct transmission of concurrent data and resolve the uncertainties of communication channels in the across-organizational business process, a new modeling method of dynamic service interaction based on pi-calculus is proposed in this paper. The pi-calculus is selected as the formal modeling language in this method. And three service interaction patterns, which includes request with referral, relayed response and dynamic routing, is studied to build the formal model with the channel mobility and the messaging mechanism of pi-calculus. In case of the bidding activities, a formal model is established and simulated based on pi-calculus in this paper. Furthermore, a tool named MWB is used to automatically validate the model in order to ensure the accuracy and the consistency of process. It proved the applicability and feasibility of the modeling based on the pi-calculus in the dynamic service interaction.
Flexible business processes can often be modelled more easily using a declarative rather than a procedural modelling approach. Process mining aims at automating the discovery of business process models. Existing declarative process mining approaches either suffer from performance issues with real-life event logs or limit their expressiveness to a specific set of constaint types. Lately, RelationalXES, a relational database architecture for storing event log data, has been introduced. In this paper, we introduce a mining approach that directly works on relational event data by querying the log with conventional SQL. By leveraging database performance technology, the mining procedure is fast without limiting itself to detecting certain control-flow constraints. Queries can be customised and cover process perspectives beyond control-flow, e.g., organisational aspects. We evaluated the performance and the capabilities of our approach with regard to several real-life event logs.
Over the past decade most of engineers, researchers, institutions, standard organizations and businessmen had been faced with challenges on how to represent productivity functions for effort estimation in information system workflow development. Despite the fact that workflows are everywhere, only few reports about its development effort are available. Accurate workflow sizing is a very difficult task at conceptual state. This paper proposes the proximity scoring measurement method to determine workflow size and to estimate workflow development effort with its knowledge retention effort. The approach is applied to the web publishing industry as a human resources case study. The approach of this paper is scalable and easy to apply to evaluate Web human resource workflow development effort. The implication of this work is that workflows can be estimated more precisely, helping to estimate the benefit of workflow reuse.
Federal Government publishes laws and decrees daily. However, a simple search can return inconsistent information about this document, when its status has been changed later in another document through a government act like publication, grinding, re-publication, cancellation and amendment. The goal of this paper is to present the solution adopted by the Federal Budget Secretary responsible for monitoring decrees, legislation, jurisprudence and administrative actions related to federal budget control. Thus, the knowledge represented treat the lifecycle of this type of documents by adding properties such as signature date, signing authority and role of authority at time of signature, providing chronological and semantic processing on the search for document types. The RDF conceptual model for knowledge representation was adopted, since it is a standard for open data from federal government on the Web to facilitate citizen access to information, thus fulfilling the constitutional provision that defines the citizen as the holder of the access right to information. On the Case Study performed was necessary to crawl and mining Brazilian Official Gazette for documents identification of Federal Budget domain and the subsequent extraction of knowledge about the transformations undergone by each decree.
This work presents the approach used to select documents from the Brazilian Official Gazette for Federal Treasury domain and manage the explicit knowledge through a thesaurus according to ISO Standard 2788. The goal of the SIOP-LEGIS project joint with Department of Treasury is to facilitate search and retrieval of documents semantic related through hierarquic terms defined in the Thesaurus. The paper also presents a brief case study to demonstrate how the ontology domain evolution ocurrs in accordance with the legislation, case law and administrative acts in constant changes.
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