Capturing variability in business process models: the Provop approach

Usually, for a particular business process different variants exist. Each of them constitutes an adjustment of a reference process model to specific requirements building the process context. Contemporary process management tools do not adequately support the modeling of such process variants. Either the variants have to be specified as separate process models or they are expressed in terms of conditional branches within the same process model. Both methods often lead to redundancies making model adaptations a time‐consuming and error‐prone task. In this article, we discuss selected concepts of the Provop approach for modeling and managing process variants. A particular process variant can be configured at a high level of abstraction by applying a set of well‐defined change operations to a reference process model. In particular, this article discusses advanced concepts for the design and modeling of such a reference process model as well as for the adjustments required to configure the different process variants. Altogether, Provop provides a flexible and powerful solution for process variant management. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Business process modeling (BPM) is one of the key technologies to benefit enterprises with higher efficiencies and greater business values. However, BPM requires intensive business expertise and human resources. Thus, it is valuable and challenging to enable fast delivery of reusable business process designs, regarding the existence of various popular business processes modeling languages and fast changing markets. In this paper, we generate language-specific business process models and process interaction semantics from UML 2.0 process models. A WS-BPEL metadata model and a process interaction semantics metadata model is defined to annotate UML 2.0 business process model as stereotypes; with a set of transformation patterns, we can generate a WS-BPEL business process model and a process interaction semantics file from each annotated UML 2.0 process model. Our approach can also be similarly applied to other process modeling languages to highly reuse the business process model in UML 2.0.

Business process modelling is an important part of system design. When designing or redesigning a business process, stakeholders specify, negotiate, and agree on business requirements to be satisfied, including non-functional requirements that concern the quality of the business process. This thesis addresses the question of how to specify and compute the quality of a business process, given the model that stakeholders use. The motivation for this thesis is the increasing importance of the quality of business processes. Knowing the quality of specific business processes enables stakeholders to judge if these processes need improvement. Knowing the quality of the constructs of those processes (viz., events, inputs, activities, and outputs) and the way they are structured enables a more detailed analysis of their shortcomings and provides a basis for the design of improvements. The research challenge of this thesis is grounded in the assumption that: “Organisations need an appropriate means to effectively compute achievement of their goals and objectives by their business processes.” Given this challenge, the main research question on which this thesis focuses is: “Can the quality of a business process be computed quantitatively at different levels of granularity?” The research objective is: “To develop frameworks, factors, and metrics for computing non-functional requirements (quality) of business processes quantitatively at different levels of granularity.” The outcomes of this thesis are: 1) BPIMM, a language-independent business process integrating meta-model, based on the concepts of seven mainstream business process modelling languages: BPMN, EPC, RAD, UML AD, SADT, IDEF0, and IDEF3. 2) BPC-QC (Business Process Concept - Quality Computation), an approach to quality computation at the lowest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BPC-QEF (Business Process Concept - Quality Evaluation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of the constructs of a business process: event, input, activity, and output. ii. A set of business process quality dimensions and factors. The following quality dimensions are distinguished: performance, efficiency, reliability, recoverability, permissibility, and availability. Each dimension categorises different quality aspects in terms of factors. A non-exhaustive set of sixteen quantitative factors is provided. iii. Quality metrics for each of the quality factors, to facilitate a quantitative computation of the quality of a specific construct of a business process. 3) BP-QC (Business Process - Quality Computation), an approach to compute the quality at the highest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BP-CQCF (Business Process - Compositional Quality Computation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of a business process as a whole, given the quality of its constructs. ii. A set of generic business process modelling patterns to decompose a business process into more succinct parts, namely: sequential, parallel with synchronisation, exclusive, inclusive, simple loop, and complex loop. iii. A set of over one hundred computational formulae. For each combination of modelling pattern and a quality factor, there is a formula to compute the quality. 4) AAV (Approach to Application and Validation), an evaluation plan to evaluate BPIMM, BPC-QC and BP-QC in practice, together with expert stakeholders. The plan consists of the units of measure, a measurement model, and a case study procedure. To evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis to real world business needs, four case studies have been conducted in different environments: a Dutch educational institution, a global financial institution, an international financial service provider, and a Dutch research project on crisis management. Each of these case studies concerns a different, single business process. This thesis shows that: 1) A quality computation approach can be adopted independent of a business process modelling language. 2) Quantitative quality factors can be introduced specifically for the constructs of a business process. 3) Quantitative metrics and computational formulae can be developed for specific quality factors, allowing the computation of different aspects of the quality of a business process quantitatively at different levels of granularity. 4) An evaluation plan can be developed to evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis (viz., BPIMM, BPC-QC, and BP-QC). The contributions of this thesis are designed to be beneficial to the areas of business and management, requirements engineering, software engineering, and business process modelling. In the areas of requirements engineering and software engineering, these contributions are intended to help practitioners to consider non-functional requirements at the earliest stage. In the area of business process modelling, information systems, service computing, and cloud computing, the contributions can be used for quality-driven modelling, design, and redesign. To conclude, knowing the quality value of a business process at different levels of granularity provides a basis for its improvement.

Today’s enterprises are dynamic where many variances of business process models can exist due to several reasons such as: the need to target different customer types, rely on particular IT systems or comply with specific country regulations. Automated maintenance of the consistency between process variants is an important goal that saves the time and efforts of process modelers. In this paper, we present a query-based approach to maintain consistency among process variants. We maintain the link between the variant process models by means of defining process model views. These views are defined using, BPMN-Q, a visual query language for business process models. Therefore, dynamic evaluation for the defined queries of the process views guarantee that the process modeler is able to get up-to-date and consistent status of the process model. In addition, our view-based approach allows the building of a holistic view of related variants of the same process model.

Diagnosing behavioral differences between business process models: An approach based on event structures

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to address a theoretical gap in the business process management (BPM) literature on factors that influence the acceptance and use of business process modelling (PM) in organisations. The paper seeks to contribute to theory building and practice in BPM through better understanding of important determinants of PM adoption and use.Design/methodology/approachA combination of literature review and 34 interviews in context was used to develop a PM acceptance model that was subsequently empirically tested using survey data from 74 companies.FindingsThe paper provides empirical insights about how business PM can be influenced by many factors in the organisational context. It suggests that PM is a complex activity mandated by management, but influenced by individual and socio‐political factors.Research limitations/implicationsThere is a need for future research to focus on the many opposing forces that influence business PM in organisations. Future studies should analyse influence from different stakeholder groups separately to reveal their relative influence on PM activity and its outcomes.Practical implicationsThe paper identifies important forces in the organisational context that managers should focus on in their efforts to successfully implement business PM in their organisations.Originality/valueThis paper uses a triangulation of sources of information to better understand the less‐studied process of PM adoption and use in an organisational context. It contributes to theory building within BPM and to more successful BPM in organisations.

The necessity of aligning an enterprise's information system (IS) model to its business process (BP) model is incontestable to the consistent analysis of the business performance. However, the main difficulty of establishing/maintaining BP-IS model alignment stems from the dissimilarities in the knowledge of the information system developers and the business process experts. To overcome these limits, the authors propose a model-driven architecture compliant methodology that helps software analysts to build an IS analysis model aligned to a given BP model. The proposed methodology allows mastering transformation from computation independent model to platform independent model. The CIM level expresses the BP, which is modelled through the standard BPMN and, at the PIM level represents the aligned IS model, which is generated as use case diagram, system sequence diagrams, and class diagram. CIM to PIM transformation accounts for the BP structural and semantic perspectives to generate an aligned IS model that respects the best-practice granularity level and the quality of UML diagrams.

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

While functional concerns are well supported in current business process modeling languages such as the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), many important non-functional concerns such as security and quality of service (QoS) cannot be expressed. Some works proposed specific extensions to business process modeling languages to express certain non-functional concerns. However, most related works focus only on expressing non-functional properties in business process models without considering their realization on the implementation level. In this paper, we present a generic approach to non-functional concerns in business processes and bridge the gap between process modeling and process implementation by generating AO4BPEL aspects that enforce and realize the non-functional properties specified in the business process model. The functional part of the processes is realized by generating executable WS-BPEL code out of BPMN process models. The approach is not specific to a particular non-functional concern and the usage of aspects ensures a modular implementation of the business process.

Business process analysis and modeling is a crucial step in formulating information systems user requirements. The practice of information technology (IT) development does not indicate a lack of problems in spite of the growing number of modeling techniques. This article gives an action research account of formulating and applying a new business process modeling framework to manufacturing processes to guide software development. It is based on a combination of soft systems methodology (SSM) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) business process modeling extensions suggested by Eriksson and Penker. SSM has been linked to information systems provision in the past. The examination of prior research shows that there is no underlying reasoning about the justification from a methodological point of view of the combination of SSM and UML. This article justifies the mixing of SSM and Eriksson and Penker’s UML extensions using the ideas of Mingers’ Multimethodology. The latter helps to overcome the ontological complexities of combining soft and hard techniques in a single intervention. The proposed framework was applied to modeling the production process in an aluminum rolling plant as a step in the development of a new information system for it. The reflections on the intervention give details on how actual learning and appreciation is facilitated using SSM, leading to better UML models in this complex problem.

Contemporary tools for business process modeling use menu-based interfaces for visualizing process models and interacting with them. However, pure menu-based interactions have been optimized for applications running on desktop computers and are limited regarding their use on multi-touch devices. At the same time, the increasing distribution of mobile devices in business life as well as their multi-touch capabilities offer promising perspectives for intuitively defining and adapting business process models. Additionally, multi-touch tables could improve collaborative business process modeling based on natural gestures and interactions. In this paper we present the results of an experiment in which we investigate the way users model business processes with multi-touch devices. Furthermore, a core gesture set is suggested enabling the easy definition and adaption of business process models on these devices. Overall, gesture-based process modeling and multi-touch devices allow for new ways of (collaborative) business process modeling.

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.

Business process models play an important role in today’s organizations and they are stored in models repositories. Organizations need to handle hundreds or even thousands of process models within their model repositories, which serve as a knowledge base for business process management. Similarity measures can detect similarities between Business process models and consequently they play an important role in the management of business processes. Existing researches are mostly based on the syntactic similarities based on labels of activities and deal with mapping of type 1:1. To address the problem, semantic similarities remain difficult to detect and this problem is accentuated when dealing with mapping of type n:m and considering large models. In this paper, we will present a solution for detecting similarities between business process models by taking into account the semantics. We will use a genetic algorithm, which is a well-known metaheuristic, to find a good enough mapping between two process models.

Configurable processes are increasingly being adopted by enterprises that seek experience sharing and best practice adoption. A configurable process is a customizable model that specifies how different enterprises perform similar processes. At the modeling level, a configurable process model provides for flexible business process (BP) reuse by (de)selecting the (ir)relevant parts to derive a particular process variant. At the exploitation level, it offers flexibility and agility to an enterprise looking to outsource its BP to different providers cooperating in a cloud federation. More specifically, an enterprise can use a configurable process model to derive particular process variants that it outsources depending on its objectives. In particular, it may opt for outsourcing the variant that results in the optimal deployment, e.g., having the minimal cost of allocated cloud services that fulfill the user quality of service (QoS) requirements. However, identifying the optimal deployment variants is a complex problem because of the heterogeneity of services within a cloud federation and the number of possible variants that can be derived from a configurable process model. In addition, the complexity of this problem increases for variable user QoS requirements. In this paper, we propose an approach to derive, from a configurable process model, the variant that has the optimal deployment in a cloud federation. We propose a linear programming approach that accounts for the variability of both the BP model and the user QoS requirements, and that ensures an optimal time-aware cloud service allocation. We experimentally show the effectiveness and flexibility of our approach on a generated testbed.

The article discusses the option of modelling a business process using a logistics concept to optimise costs. The issues of influence on the formation of the model, the concept of optimising transport costs, and the costs of inventory management, in terms of production and economic efficiency, are considered. The mathematical and economic model of a typical business process is shown as a formed economic paradigm that materialises the process of conceptual integration of technological and logistic approaches in the process of implementing critical business processes of the company's current activities.The article also touches upon the issues of calculating logistics costs, both in the context of their points of origin, that is, by functional areas, and general accounting in the context of each business process. The options for calculating this category of costs are considered, in the general flow of both material and financial resources of a separate business process. From the standpoint of a logistic approach to managing the total operating costs of key business processes, options for a comprehensive study of the impact of logistics costs on the general operating activities of the company are analysed.The methodology for constructing a mathematical-economic model of a typical business process is described, taking into account the factors of influence of logistics concepts. Practical use of this methodology in real economic conditions is considered, and recommendations are given for adapting the methodology to specific parameters of the subject of the economic system. The proposed model outlines the fundamental approaches to the mathematically verified analysis of vital economic parameters that characterise the fluid nature of the economic components of the modern free market. The stated methodology, while not claiming to be complete coverage of the issues presented, nevertheless assumes the possibility of practical implementation of simulation modelling, economically crucial for current operational activities, fundamental business processes.