A Process-Aware Inter-organizational Service Integration Platform to Support Collaborative Organizations

Business processes are essential components of all enterprises and the use of models, languages and execution engines as components of a Business Process Management (BPM) deployment are now commonplace. By definition, these processes describe an enterprise in terms of its organizational knowledge, structure and activities, and are often essential to realizing an organization's competitive advantage. It thus follows that the design, execution and, critically, responsiveness to change in the system or environment they are affecting, is of prime significance toward establishing and maintaining efficient business operation. Deploying a high quality and effective Business Process Management System (BPMS) is thus utterly essential to many modern enterprises. Yet current trends toward flexible methods of working, just-in-time organizational reaction times, distributed intra-organization and interorganization collaboration and constantly changing markets are creating new and complex business landscapes. This brings about increased complexity, further motivating the need for real-time dynamic change throughout an enterprise's business processes; ever more dynamic environments require key business processes to be more flexible and automated in both their design and behaviour. Yet many companies are now discovering that investments in conventional BPMS often suffers from poor return on investment due to a common inability to create business process models that are both meaningful to business people and capable of offering the real-time process flexibility and rapid process adaptation required to cope effectively with the fluid business conditions typifying many modern enterprises. As evidenced by our work with customers in the manufacturing domain, there is very often a need to alter executing process structures, sometimes in real-time, without perturbing the integrity of running process instances. If a BPMS is not built to innately support change in this manner the result can be reductions in both dependability and visibility, especially from a management perspective. Our observation is that many of the current procedural approaches to BPM are too inflexible and unresponsive to change, especially in any automated fashion. In fact many BPMS solutions provide only design-time modelling, with neither support for run-time determination of process structure, nor direct execution of industry standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) process models without the need for first translating BPMN into intermediary formats, such as the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), in preparation for execution. In practice, these issues imply that process models can tend to become overly complex and brittle through the necessity of coding-in all O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .in te ch w eb .o rg

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) provide automated support for the execution of business processes in modern organisations. With the advent of cloud computing, the deployment of BPMS is shifting from traditional on-premise models to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) paradigm with the aim of delivering Business Process Automation as a Service on the cloud. To cope with the impact of numerous simultaneous requests from multiple tenants, a typical SaaS approach will launch multiple instances of its core applications and distribute workload to these application instances via load balancing strategies that operate under the assumption that tenant requests are stateless. However, since business process executions are stateful and often long-running, strategies that assume statelessness are inadequate for ensuring a uniform distribution of system load. In this paper, we propose several new load balancing strategies that support the deployment of BPMS in the cloud by taking into account (a) the workload imposed by the execution of stateful process instances from multiple tenants and (b) the capacity and availability of BPMS workflow engines at runtime. We have developed a prototypical implementation built upon an open-source BPMS and used it to evaluate the performance of the proposed load balancing strategies within the context of diverse load scenarios with models of varying complexity.

In previous chapters, we have discussed the use of the multilevel business artifact (MBA) for multilevel business process modeling in order to better represent the interactions between the different hierarchy levels within a company. As the preparation for a proof-of-concept implementation, in Chapter 6, we have introduced an XML-based logical representation for MBAs. Relying on this XML representation, in this chapter, we present the implementation concept for a business process management system that enables the MBA-based (semi-)automated execution of multilevel business processes. A business process management system manages process-related data and allows for the event-driven execution of business processes; a business process management system also records event data. The recording of event data in event logs is a pre-requisite for business process intelligence which allows for performance analysis and the subsequent improvement of business processes based on the analysis results.

Teamwork, collaboration and coordination are key aspects of the patient-centric approach taken by modern healthcare. Although many projects have been and are currently being undertaken to improve support for health care professionals, adequate support for teamwork, communication and coordination has yet to be achieved. The delivery of the healthcare service is very challenging as it involves heterogeneous distributed systems, multi-professionals and dependent tasks among each. In addition, the treatment journey of each patient is unique as a decision is usually made according to several constraints related to the patient, medical condition, patient’s choice, available resources and/or doctor’s consultation decision. We believe that, in order to provide the required support, it is necessary to explicitly acknowledge the patient’ s medical state within their treatment journey. This project proposes the use of a Business Process Management (BPM) system that uses associations between patients, health care professionals, and the Integrated Care Pathway (ICP) to provide improved support for healthcare professionals as individuals and members of integrated care teams. Moreover, mapping the ICP into the BPM system will help support the implementation of best practice according to the national guidelines. By leveraging the information contained in these associations, and understanding the patient progress along the dynamic care pathway, this proposal provides tailored context-based actions. This includes automated notifications, alerts, scheduling and timers, as well as supporting treatment continuity and tracking as the patient progresses through their treatment journey. Clinicians’ and developers’ feedback on this proposal has been very positive.Keywordsbusiness process management (BPM)case managementcontext-based actionsintegrated care pathway (ICP)workflow technology

A highly efficient algorithm towards optimal data storage and regeneration cost in multiple clouds

Information System is one of the key domain in which lot of research has been done in the past few years. Applying Information systems to heterogeneous and distributed environments is one of the current research areas. Business Process Management Systems is the information systems which deal with the administration of tasks in the business processes, organizational structures, or in the related context. The Workflow Management system, the early idea of BPM, controls the workflow in an organization, data transfer, and integration of legacy information systems with existing programs and program modules, delegation of business tasks. Offering task management services especially modeling of business processes and underlying organizations, BPM serves it meaning and incorporates the WFM system. BPM supporting the use of knowledge concerning the awareness/unawareness of integrated software, and analysis of processes and organizational structure in terms of verification, modification, evaluation are key management in BPM system I.INTRODUCTION TO BPM: Combination of corporate restructuring and mergers urged the department and processes to be automated and linked together. Unfortunately it created largely disconnected spaghetti of systems and applications. Business Process Management (BPM) was born from a strong need to streamline internal processes and connections between both internal and external functions. It provides ability to model, monitor, manage and manipulate processes quickly in response to changes in strategy and market forces. BPM is an extension of classical Work Flow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. BPM delivers the maximum utility of legacy system. It is a method for revolutionizing the way the work moves throughout an organization. II.COMPONENTS OF BPM: The four key elements in Business Process Management are: Process modeling, Process rule, Process management, and Process performance analytics. Process modeling: Process modeling describes the flow of information (business process).It helps in building a model of process and mapping into an implementation frame work. Modeling requires a consistent analysis and representation of the processes. It forms the basis for the userspecific process environment. Process Rule: Process Rule is a heart of the BPM. It involves execution of discrete steps & integration of information. A process rules engine is used for this purpose. The engine is to monitor and manage the given steps by providing a flow control over the business process. If a process fails or delayed, a compensated action can be done to rectify. Process Management: Process Management is to correlate business/application events to fundamental business metrics .It enables the organization to monitor and optimize the business process. Once the process has been analyzed, modeled and the associated rules are formed. The next stage involves the visualization and management. Visualization means transaction data ranging from holistic to process-state or client state specific rules. Process Performance Analytics: Process Performance Analytics is a transition data source available for sophisticated management analytics .This data should be available on a retrospective or real-time basis. It should answer to one of the most difficult question like “how much does it cost to process a specific transaction?” By this way BPM mainly addresses four components. They are Work Flow Management, Content and records management Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business Activity monitoring (BAM). III.RELEVENCE TO SYSTEM INTEGRATION: BPM can be fitted easily on the top of existing IT system. It is the Process rules that governs all the happenings and optimizes the process. BPM will not be able to work without the connectivity provided by the EAI layer. EAI layer provides BPM to gain and measure the value from the investment. On the other hand, BPM provides value to the EAI technology layer of Information technology. BPM layer offers business management the view of the message processing layer. It is used to unlock the value of the information held in the integration layer. It is also used to gather data of every transaction in the lifecycle. IV.APPLICATION OF BPM: BPM can be applied to any application which needs these advantages. BPM reduces unnecessary high losses in time critical transactions, helps to provide any critical information, practical application yield fast ROI ,better control over the information, identifying and maximizing the benefits faster, better analysis and tracking, provides enterprise-wide visibility of business processes, improve the effectiveness of the core operations, provides ability to coordinate interactions between information systems, business process and the people, flexible and easily changed by non-technical business people.

There are numerous organizations that limit themselves to the modeling of business processes and do not automate and execute business processes using a Business Process Management System (BPMS). Consequently, these organizations cannot exploit the potential of process execution logs for the performance analysis of their business processes. In this study, we contend that customer feedback in natural language is a rich source of information that can provide valuable indications about process performance. However, as the number of comments increases, the time and effort required to synthesize them and elicit indications about process performance increases exponentially. To that end, in this paper we propose an approach that takes customer feedback as input and provides valuable indications about process performance. Specifically, the proposed approach is composed of three types of classification that leverage from a supervised learning technique to automatically classify customer feedback. The classified comments are subsequently used to generate answers to performance related questions. Evaluation of the proposed approach is conducted by using a real-life case study of an academic institute. For the case study we collected 4366 student comments about the admission process of the institute and manually classified the comments for each type of classification. Subsequently, these classified comments are used as a benchmark for the evaluation of our proposed approach. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Nowadays, the problem in business process management (BPM) is that BPM systems should both be easy to use for business process developers and be based on a sound formal method. Business process management systems are often based on semiformal modeling techniques such as event-driven process chains (EPC) or UML. Unlike semiformal modeling techniques, the process calculus CSP comes with mature verification sup- port. Surprisingly little work has been done on using CSP for business process modeling and management. In this paper, we present our approach to business process management, which is based on the observation that CSP is well suited not only for specifying business processes and verifying work???ows but also for executing work???ows using our CSP4J framework. We report on a work???ow server, which is specified in CSP and implemented using our CSP4J framework. The server accepts work???ows that are modeled in CSP and also implemented using CSP4J. This allows us to integrate the mature verification support of CSP into both the management system itself and the development process of the end users’ business process definitions.

The process of building Data Warehouses (DW) is well known with well defined stages but at the same time, mostly carried out manually by IT people in conjunction with business people. Web Warehouses (WW) are DW whose data sources are taken from the web. We define a flexible WW, which can be configured accordingly to different domains, through the selection of the web sources and the definition of data processing characteristics. A Business Process Management (BPM) System allows modeling and executing Business Processes (BPs) providing support for the automation of processes. To support the process of building flexible WW we propose a two BPs level: a configuration process to support the selection of web sources and the definition of schemas and mappings, and a feeding process which takes the defined configuration and loads the data into the WW. In this paper we present a proof of concept of both processes, with focus on the configuration process and the defined data.

The ability to rapidly find potential business partners as well as rapidly set up a collaborative business process is desirable in the face of market turbulence. Traditional linking of business processes has a large ad hoc character. Implementing service-oriented business process mashup in an appropriate way will deliver the collaborative business process more flexibility, adaptability and agility. In this chapter, we describe new landscape for supporting collaborative business processes. The different solutions and tools for collaborative business process applications are presented. A new approach for supporting situational collaborative business process, process-oriented mashup is introduced. We have highlighted the security and scalability challenges of process-oriented mashups. Further, benefits of using process-oriented mashup are discussed.

Current globalisation of economy drives organisations to streamline their business processes and to quickly form collaboration for responding to fast changing market opportunities. This thesis is dedicated to proposing a novel organisation-oriented view methodology for collaborative business process management. This methodology observes a collaborative business process from the perspective of individual organisations, and provides comprehensive solutions to the privacy, autonomy and openness issues in business collaboration. In this thesis, we first propose a relative workflow model to formalise the business process modelling from the organisation-oriented perspective. This model deploys a constraint-based visibility control mechanism to protect business privacy, and to distinguish the partnerships between collaborating organisations. At the instance level, we investigate the instance correspondence in a collaborative business process, and characterise the instance correspondence in terms of the workflow cardinality and instance correlations. An extended Petri net model formalises the representation and dynamic tracing of the instance correspondence. On this basis, we utilise the instance correspondence to perform inter-organisational workflow tracking from each participating organisation point of view. In addition, we develop a series of representation matrices and matrix operations that allow dynamic tracking and monitoring on collaborative business processes. To demonstrate the applicability of the organisation-oriented view methodology, we conduct two case studies on a virtual organisation alliance and a transient supply chain, respectively. Finally, a system design is introduced to demonstrate the feasibility and deployment of our methodology in the Web service environment. The research reported in this thesis provides a comprehensive solution for collaborative business process management. The reported research puts forward an innovative idea and constructs a solid foundation for future research towards collaborative business process management.

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) need to be able to take into account the fluctuating demand for computational resources during the execution of business process activities. Today, BPMS rely on the leasing and releasing of virtual machines (VMs) on cloud resources, which leads to a rather coarse-grained allocation of computational resources. This may result in an increase in the execution cost, flexibility restrictions, and a negative impact on the Quality of Service. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we introduce the Vienna Platform for Elastic Processes on Containers (ViePEP-C). ViePEP-C is an elastic BPMS that uses containers instead of VMs for the execution of business process activities on cloud resources, leading to a more fine-grained execution environment. To achieve this, ViePEP-C offers cloud controller, monitoring and business process execution functionalities and provides a platform for different resource and task scheduling algorithms. To evaluate the benefits of ViePEP-C, we further present a resource and task scheduling algorithm and show that, by using containers as execution environment, the execution cost can be decreased by over 20 percent (compared to a state-of-the-art VM-based scheduling algorithm) while considering a high service level.

In order to increase IT and business agility or to improve IT systems and business processes integration many organizations are currently implementing business process management systems (BPMS) or adopting a service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm. However, in doing so, IT complexity will admittedly increase and IT managers then are in need of effective governance techniques covering both strategic initiatives, BPM and SOA. This contribution re-examines the problem domain in the novel Enhanced Process-Driven Architecture (ePDA) model in order to systematically derive the requirements for combined BPM and SOA governance. We then formulate a semantic meta model capable of capturing necessary artifacts and describe its technical implementation in Software AG’s and Fujitsu’s joint CentraSite governance re gis try/repository. As "lessons learned" from several projects we systematically derive governance benefits using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and highlight measures on software deployment issues.KeywordsSOA GovernanceBPM GovernanceBusiness Process Manage-mentIT GovernanceAnalytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

This chapter introduces a modelling language called Awareness Net for both representation as well as measuring the knowledge-sharing requirements in collaborative business processes. It is a conceptual model that facilitates representation and analysis of knowledge-sharing requirements of the actors in collaborative business processes. The representation and measurement are handled by a set of collaborative semantic concepts and their relationships. The proposed language enforces overall specification of what matters to the actors in collaborative processes when collaborating in business process to keep them aware of the collaboration context.

Industry 4.0 is a key strategic trend of the economy. Virtual factories are key building blocks for Industry 4.0 where product design processes, manufacturing processes and general collaborative business processes across factories and enterprises are integrated. In the context of EU H2020 FIRST (vF Interoperation suppoRting buSiness innovaTion) project, end users of vFs are not experts in business process modelling to guarantee correct collaborative business processes for realizing execution. To enable automatic execution of business processes, verification is an important step at the business process design stage to avoid errors at runtime. Research in business process model verification has yielded a plethora of approaches in form of languages and tools that are based on Petri nets family and temporal logic. However, no report specifically targets and presents a comparative assessment of these approaches based on criteria as one we propose. In this paper we present an assessment of the most common verification approaches based on their expressibility, flexibility, suitability and complexity. We also look at how big data impacts the business process verification approach in a data-rich world.