Design and implementation of flexible E-Government platform based on XML Data-Bus and lightweight MVC execution framework ASSH

Evaluation of public sector automation platforms, also known as e-government platforms is complicated due to several incoherent e-government maturity models. Further, these e-government maturity models are not specifically tailored to evaluating e-government platforms from a citizen perspective. A key component of a citizen facing e-government platform is the level to which it enables citizen participation to a level that they feel empowered. This study applied the Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation to evaluate the e-government platforms in Kenya. The results indicate that the e-government platforms in Kenya are still at the levels of non-participation and tokenism. The e-government platforms are yet to reach the highest level of citizen participation known as citizen empowerment. The study enhances our understanding of e-government evaluation from a citizen view and can be useful to policy makers during the design and implementation of e-government platforms

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.

For enhancing the trustworthiness of business processes, a business process definition method is given and a kind of dynamic semantics is appointed to this business process definition. The dynamic semantics is expressed as a finite state automata. According to the dynamic semantics, algorithms are proposed to analyze the trustworthiness of the business processes.

Recent studies explore context-awareness as a new paradigm and principle in BPM (Business Process Management). However, there is still a lack of consensus on the meaning of context related concepts in the BPM area. While most people tacitly understand what context is and use context to optimize business processes, they find it hard to define. Researchers commonly provide their own definitions according to their own background and expertise, which leads to diversity and inconsistency. Hence, this paper provides a comprehensive understanding of the context concepts of context-aware BPM based on an extensive literature review. We excessively review and analyze existing definitions of the context concept, and propose a pyramid model to depict the trade-off between generalization and specification. Definitions of context-aware business processes have been derived from various perspectives of how a business process can potentially benefit from being aware of its context, which can be broadly classified to three categories including process flexibility, personalized services and knowledge-intensive tasks. Then we propose our definitions of the context of a business process and the context-aware business process, which can be used in general applications. In addition, context related concepts of business processes, including context-sensitive, -aware and -adaptive business processes, are clarified and distinguished to set the theoretical foundation of context-aware BPM consistently.

In September 2008, Origin completed a $9.6 billion transaction with ConocoPhillips to form Australia Pacific LNG (APLNG)—a fifty-fifty coal seam gas to liquified natural gas joint venture. As the upstream operator, Origin is planning to ramp up production to more than five times present production levels. In a two-year period, Origin tripled Queensland CSG production volumes to 300 Tj per day. This expansion was based on existing business systems and processes and it was recognised that additional capability would be required to further ramp up production and associated activities. A project was commissioned to build operational capability and capacity—processes, systems, organisation design and people—to efficiently drill the required number of production wells. This priority project addressed a business objective to step up the drilling of CSG production wells from approximately 60 to 350–400 per annum. The transformational solution comprised three key components: business process re-engineering, technology development, and organisational re-design. The solution included the definition, documentation and transformation of business processes—this ensured consistent, repeatable and scalable processes capable of drilling of 350–400 wells per annum. The processes are now enabled by resource scheduling and document management systems that are fully integrated. The resultant well delivery system is managed by a team that provides the business with decision making information regarding the resource use required to support the delivery of the APLNG commitments. Given the transformational nature of the solution, the delivery of all three components was under-pinned with change management impact assessments, education, communications and deployment. The total solution was deployed in August 2010.

During the early 1990s, workflow technologies were the only ones to offer a transversal integration capacity to the enterprise applications, thus allowing the representation and the enactment of business processes. However, the formalisms developed for workflow specifications were almost systematically activity oriented. Consequently, the resulting process definitions have the advantage to be easily transformable in executable code, but the disadvantage of being prescriptive and rigid. Recent works underline the needs in term of flexible and adaptive workflows, whose execution can evolve according to situations that cannot always be prescribed. In fact, a flexible representation of business processes is an asset to maintain the fit between business processes and their supporting systems in an evolving environment. This article proposes a conceptual framework for an intention‐driven modeling of flexible workflow applications. The purpose of the underlying modeling formalism is to define an integration/orchestration for islands of business process chunks and their support systems in order to create and to maintain the fit between them. The modeling framework offers the ability to represent in the same business process definition the well‐structured process chunks as well as the ill‐structured orad hocones. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper proposes an approach to the emergency work order dispatch problem in electric power utilities. Given the available repair crews and their already assigned commercial orders, mathematical models based on definitions and criteria related to utilities' business processes describe the complete assignment in order to serve each pending emergency work order. One key aspect refers to the real-time constraint, what means that computational system must be able to handle a solution to the emergency work order dispatch problem with response times in the order of milliseconds or even microseconds. First business process definition is presented, followed by the emergency work order dispatch problem description. Preliminary experiments have shown how suitable can be the proposed definition when addressing the referred problem. Finally, conclusions point out the main contributions of this work.

Проблемы мировой экономики, вызванные пандемией COVID-19, оказали существенное влияние на уровень и качество жизни населения многих стран. Корректно идентифицированные и выстроенные бизнес-процессы, способность их быстрого анализа и корректировки в условиях новой действительности позволили государствам снизить риски стагнации национальной экономики. В статье исследованы теоретические аспекты бизнес-процессов, история их становления, разобраны труды наиболее ярких представителей научного мира, посвятивших себя этой проблеме, сформулированы основанные на их достижениях и недостатках новые определения актуальные на сегодняшний день, а также представлено авторское определение бизнес-процессов. The problems of the global economy caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have had a significant impact on the level and quality of life of the population of many countries. Correctly identified and structured business processes, the ability to quickly analyze and adjust them in the conditions of the new reality allowed states to reduce the risks of stagnation of the national economy. The article examines the theoretical aspects of business processes, the history of their formation, analyzes the works of the most prominent representatives of the scientific world who devoted themselves to this problem, formulates new definitions based on their achievements and shortcomings that are relevant today, and also presents the author's definition of business processes.

This chapter presents the concept of development and management of SOA applications within the configurable service platform which supports all phases starting from business process definition. The unique features of the platform include: business process compatibility, easy reconfiguration of composition schemes, visual support for requirements and service definition, QoS assessment (including communication services) and service execution control. Moreover, it illustrates how effective tools for SOA management may be developed within the SOA paradigm itself, and how this paradigm may be used to achieve their interoperability and flexibility.

In service-oriented environment, a number of providers may offer functionally identical services with different Quality of Service (QoS). Sometimes, some providers lure customers to discover and select their services by deception. To address the unreliability of web services and other issues, we propose a reliable composite service computation framework, which integrates business process definitions with composite service selection and service binding. The proposed framework utilizes flexible business process definitions to support flexible selections of service composition during business process enactment. In the end, a case study was illustrated to verify the effectiveness of this technology.

Current workflow products can support more complex modeling of business processes, workflow engine mechanism is well researched, but the link between organizational elements and process activities is less well understood. In access control, most products can only support fixed role-based task assignment, not enough in considering more complex security policies, such as DSOD, task binding of duties, and temporal constraints, that important in dynamic workflow system. This paper examines workflow access control requirement in practice, analyzes WFMC workflow meta-model, and adopts the R&TBAC approach to separate role-based organization and task-based authorization-step modeling, and especially designs an agent-based dynamic policy enforcement mechanism to bridge the gap. The intelligent task assigning agent to be defined as a virtual participant in workflow process definition, and creating within workflow engine controlled available task instance, acts as to evaluate task dynamic authorization policy to provide eligible task participant role-set based on its information model. This paper gives a formal specification of the workflow authorization model, and designs the agent information model, assigning policy model, and function model in detail. The modeling approach can widely adapt to various existing workflow systems and can automatically change policy as enterprise organization or business process definition need changing.

In this paper, we consider the design of a new secure transmission scheme for a four-node relay-eavesdropper channel, where user cooperation is used to facilitate secure communications. The key idea of the proposed achievable scheme is to apply the compression relaying concept of noisy network coding (NNC) to the secrecy communication scenario. But different from the original non-secrecy NNC, the compression rate at the relay is adaptively chosen according to the eavesdropping channel. Particularly, helping interference information is injected into the compression codebook at the relay by simply enlarging the compression rate, which is to effectively suppress the eavesdropping channel. Closed-form expressions of the secrecy rates achieved by the proposed NNC-based secure scheme are characterized for both the discrete memoryless and Gaussian relay-eavesdropper channels, where the optimal compression rate and the optimal transmit power at the relay are also determined. The proposed secure scheme can be viewed as a general framework, which naturally combines the NNC compression relaying scheme with the interference-assisted scheme. Analytical and numerical results demonstrate that the proposed secure scheme offers constant performance gains over typical existing cooperative secure schemes.

This article describes the functional scope of a low-code development platform for modeling and implementation of business processes to support outbreak investigations.LCDP (Low-Code Development Platforms) are development tools that allow you to create applications using a minimum amount of traditional programming code. They help speed up the software development process by reducing the need to write manual code and enabling the development of applications using visual interfaces, ready-made components, and configuration rules. They can also support business process management through various mechanisms. LCDP platforms can help build applications that support Business Process Management through visual modeling of processes, the use of ready-made components, automation mechanisms that enable the performance of specific activities or decisions as part of a business process, easy integration of various external systems, which may be necessary for business processes that require cooperation with multiple tools and applications, providing mechanisms for monitoring the course of business processes and generating reports on performance, duration and other parameters, and enabling business analysts to participate in the application development process, because they do not require deep programming knowledge.The article presents the basic functionality of the platform and refers to such architectural assumptions as integrated process management, remote access, security, reliability, flexibility, openness to integration, reporting, registers, and monitoring.Particular attention was paid to the issues of modeling business processes and building applications to support activities related to epidemic investigation during an epidemic of poisonings and foodborne diseases.Epidemiological investigation to cut the paths of epidemics of poisoning and foodborne diseases is an important process to identify, control, and prevent the further spread of the disease. This process aims to understand where the infection came from, what factors led to the outbreak, and how it can be stopped. The first step is to recognize and report an outbreak or increase in foodborne illness. This can be done by analyzing epidemiological data, e.g. reports on illnesses and hospitalizations. Detailed information is then collected from patients about their symptoms, food history, places visited, food eaten, contacts with others, etc. It is important to identify common factors and sources that may be related to the disease. The next phase is analyzing the collected data to identify trends, patterns, and potential sources of the outbreak. This may include the analysis of time-disease curves, the identification of geographic disease clusters, or the analysis of consumption clusters of specific products. Based on the analysis of data, epidemiologists create hypotheses about the possible sources of infection or ways of transmitting the disease. This may include identifying specific foods, restaurants, suppliers, or water sources. To verify the hypotheses and identify the source of the epidemic, field studies are carried out, including microbiological tests of food samples, the environment, and samples from patients and people suspected of being infected. Once the source of the outbreak has been identified, action is taken to control and disrupt transmission routes. These actions consist of withdrawing contaminated products from the market, closing the source of contamination (e.g. a restaurant), and implementing hygiene and safety measures. After an epidemic intervention, monitoring of the situation continues to confirm the effectiveness of the actions and to ensure that the epidemic has been stopped. Investigation, intervention, and outcome information is also reported to relevant public health agencies.The developed platform was used as a programming base to develop a support system for the above-mentioned activities of the State Sanitary Inspection, allowing for the detection of threats and cutting the paths of spreading the epidemic.

This paper proposes a conceptual model that incorporates: (a) a business process entity, (b) a business process lifecycle aligned with the proposed entity, and (c) a compliance framework that focuses on the degree of process compliance to imposed regulatory standards. The pursuing objective is to systematize business processes through a conceptual entity applicable to Business Process Management (BPM) practices and compliance-checking. The applied methodology involves the review, interpretation and comparison of business process definitions, structural elements and their interrelations, acknowledged BPM lifecycles and compliance rules. The initial findings lead to the proposal of a contextual business process structure that sets the boundaries of business process as a clearly defined entity. The business process entity encompasses continuous modification of its design based on the feedback it generates. Additionally, a comparative analysis of prominent BPM lifecycles resulted in a proposed ‘business process lifecycle’ that allows for a better alignment of the included cycle steps. The proposed business process entity is also related with process compliance practices to produce compliance-aware business processes. The introduced conceptual model can assist professionals in apprehending core business process features, focusing on process flexibility and redesign. It can also serve as a preliminary prototype for checking the degree of compliance between a business process and the applicable compliance rules.

Quantum secret sharing is an important way to achieve secure communications, which has critical applications in the field of information security for its physical properties. According to the perspective of the practical applications, improving the confidentiality and integrity of secret sharing schemes is a good method to increase the security and reliability of communications. In this paper, we propose a quantum secret sharing scheme based on generator matrix segmentation and the structural features of quantum graph states. The security of the secure secret sharing scheme is guaranteed by the pattern of transferring information by stabilizers, scalability of the information and new recovery strategy provided by the entanglement of the related graph states. It puts forward an effective solution to the problem of matrix cycle period, where some numbers without the primitive element cannot construct the generation matrix. First of all, the physical properties of quantum bits (qubits), such as uncertainty principle, no-cloning theorem and indistinguishability, not only optimize the classical schemes but also ensure the absolute safety of communication. Secondly, the application of matrix segmentation makes secret information has better scalability. It improves the coding diversity and the difficulty in deciphering. Thirdly, the favorable entanglement properties and mature experiment preparation techniques of graph states provide an approach to the practical applications. The superiority of the yielded graph states is described in graphical fashion with an elegant stabilizer. Fourthly, the shuffling operation can ensure the independence of the message among participants. Therefore, Eve can not obtain any useful information by measuring randomly. Two group-recovery protocols are proposed to show the secret recovering processing through rebuilding sub-secrets among legal cooperative participants. In the scheme design, the dealer extracts the classical secret information according to the corresponding principle between the classical and quantum information, and divides the classical secret through generated matrix which is produced with the primitive elements in finite domain satisfying the linear independence for any k column vectors. Then the dealer encodes information into graph states and distributes particles to the legal participants with unitary operations. Subsequently, the credible center obtains sub-secrets by the theory of graph states and the group recovery protocol. He can achieve the initial classical secret via the inverse algorithm of matrix segmentation. After getting the classical secret, he recovers quantum secret according to the relationship between classical information and quantum information. Theoretical analysis shows that this scheme can provide better security and scalability of the information. It is appropriate to realize the secret sharing in the quantum network communication to protect secrets from eavesdropping. Also, it can provide an approach to designing diverse and scalable quantum secure communication schemes based on quantum graph states, the algorithm of matrix segmentation, and group-recovery protocol.