Petri Net Based Business Process Simulation and Analysis Technology

Business Process Analysis and Optimization on Road Traffic Law Enforcement of the Beijing Intelligent Traffic Management

This research is conducted in Locarvest. Established in 2015, Locarvest is an online platform company that selling agricultural products based in Bandung. They see the importance of agricultural products for humans and people who like to shop online as an opportunity for them to sell local agricultural products online. Currently, they have been developing a website to change their selling platform which will be launched soon in the late of July 2019. They assume that the website can create a simpler selling process. However, they do not have their written business process where many companies have become increasingly interested in business processes due to the need for effective and efficient activities (Dave, 2017). In here, the objectives of this research are to analyze and model the current business process of Locarvest and propose a new business process to solve Locarvest’s current problem using the concept of Business Process Management (BPM) and the design is modeled using Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). To model the current business process, interviews with the employees of Locarvest and observation in the office were conducted. The result of this paper is proposing some improvements within the business process by eliminating some activities and create some new activities for Locarvest. The design also has been approved by the employees of Locarvest.
 Keywords: Business process, Business Process Management, Business Process Modelling Notation, case study, agriculture

This contribution explores the role of business process simulation to address change management projects dealing with organizational growth. In particular, we consider the adoption of new ICT applications in the context of a growing Small Medium Enterprise based in northern Italy. As income doubled in few years, managers exploited the opportunity to implement a more efficient material resource planning together with an accurate business process analysis. First, the organization was modeled by adopting standard notation BPMN 2.0. Second, data analysis explores organization details as orders arrival, duration of activities, staff working hours. Finally, discrete-event simulation of business processes offers interesting suggestions by varying incoming transactions as well as different parameters in the model. The approach clearly shows how modeling, computational simulation and scenario analysis of business processes are suitable tools to support organizational change.

This paper proposes a methodology for business process analysis, conceived in the context of business process (BP) management. The proposal addresses business process analysis with a knowledge management approach, adopting an Agile philosophy. It is based on the progressive, iterative construction of a knowledge base about the business organization and, specifically, the process to be innovated. The methodology proposes a set of information structures, in the form of a sequence of seven different knowledge artefacts that starts with a simple, intuitive process specification and then evolves towards richer models. The method has been conceived to be easily adopted by business experts, allowing them to acquire, model and manage business knowledge without the need of knowledge management experience. In this way, business experts are kept at the centre of the business analysis process and the created business models can be easily transferred to a Low-code platform for a seamless development of enterprise information systems.KeywordsBusiness process analysisAgile methodBusiness process modelingKnowledge representationGlossaryLexiconClass diagramOntology

1 IntroductionOrganizations focus on automate their processes in order to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and/or reduce human beings' errors in an easy and rapid manner. Business process management (BPM) methods provide a solution to this issue. In this context, information systems like CRM, ERP, SCM, etc. have known an increasing demand. The main problem consists of the length of the business process specifications. If new regulations appear, these specifications must be adapted. Manually extraction of visual models is time consuming. During time, a series of solutions were proposed. The literature shows a crowd of approaches that extracts data models [1], [2], [3], and process models [4], [5] from Natural Language (NL) text. This paper aims to analyze the Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and tools used in order to provide different types of visual representations.On the last few years, approaches based on NLP have been developed in order to automate process conversion from NL text. NLP plays an important role in NL text analysis as NLP tries to understand speech and text as humans beings would do. Colloquialism, abbreviations or typos make this task a challenging one. NLP has the origins in 1950s when Alan Turing proposed the Turing test [6], by introducing the imitation game. Since then, the literature shows a plethora of NLP tools [7], [8], [9], [10] using several machine learning techniques, our focus being on those applied on data models and process models discovery from NL text, starting with the first language parser [11] to the actual ones like NLTk [7], [8], ANTLR1, etc.Linguistic analysis is closely tied to NLP. Liddy [12] highlights 7 levels of linguistic analysis: a) Phonetic or Phonological level: how words are pronounced, b) Morphological level: prefixes, suffixes and roots analysis, c) Lexical level: word level analysis including lexical meaning and Part-Of-Speech (POS) analysis, d) Syntactic level: grammatical analysis of words in a sentence, e) Semantic level: determining the possible meanings of sentences, f) Discourse level: interpreting structure and meaning for texts larger than a sentence, g) Pragmatic level: understanding the purpose of a language.Some of the problems approached by NLP are: POS tagging, parsing, Named Entity Recognition (NER), chunking, Semantic Role Labeling (SRL). Anaphora resolution [13] refers to the interpretation of the link between the anaphor and its antecedents.The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 briefly outlines the NLP domain, describing the levels of linguistic analysis and the main NLP approaches of analyzing NL requirements. Section 3 focuses on data and process models extraction from NL text. This section makes an introduction to Object Oriented Analysis and Business Process Modeling and analyses the existing tools that discover data and process models from text. Subsequently, Section 4 summarizes the results of this work and the conclusions are drawn in Section 5.2NLPA detailed review on NLP is given in [14] and in [15]. Jones [14] divides the history of NLP into four phases: the first starts at the beginning of the 1940s and lasts to the late 1960s, the second begins from the end of 60s and lasts to the end of 70s, the third is represented by late 80s, where the fourth phase starts in the late of 90s. Next, we will detail each phase as they were defined in [14] and [15]. First phase treated machine translation issues, while the second focused on artificial intelligence. The third phase can be called grammatico-logical phase, which is followed by the lexical phase. A fifth phase is proposed in [16] where formal theories and statistical data are combined. Since this study was published first in 1994 and then it was re-organized in 2001 we can add the sixth phase: from 2000 until present where NLP techniques are combined in order to contribute to visual models extraction.Software requirements are usually written in NL which is asymmetric and irregular [17]. …

Business process management is the discipline that encompasses the analysis, modelling, implementation, execution, monitoring/control and continuous improvement of business processes. Methods and models developed for this management activity offer wide‐ranging assistance to, and potential for, most organisations, yet even a general awareness of them seems to be non‐existent in many organisations. An empirical study, conducted in the German‐speaking region of Europe, gathered useful data on issues relating to current and future investment in business process management, including initiatives in the field of business process outsourcing. Analysis of that data allows for the critical interpretation of the current viewpoint of this business discipline as well as providing some interesting new insights into applications in use, level of maturity, realised benefits and outsourcing opportunities. A bright future exists for business process management as long as the most significant hurdle, the failure to link the discipline with organisational strategy, is overcome. The pathway to achieve this lies in the development of a reliable and effective performance measurement system that, for the most part, will be unique to each organisation. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An Agile Business Process and Practice Meta-model

Increased reliance on computers by many companies and public organisations has generated a business risk for them. For example, problems in systems availability can lead to additional cost in operations, lost revenues and competitive losses. Systematic analyses are needed to avoid such losses. Prior research provides rigorous methods for identifying information systems risks and reducing the likelihood of these risks. The analysis of potential business losses in the user organisations has, however, received only limited attention. The objective in this paper is to investigate methods that can be used in the systematic identification of potential losses in the user organisation. The paper provides a review of prior literature on methods that can be used to analyse and report such losses. One understudied method is business process analysis that entails a systematic analysis of potential losses in different phases of the organisation's core business processes. Action research was used to examine the use of business process analysis as a method to associate information systems availability risk with potential business losses. The analysis was carried out in two different companies, one operating in the paper industry and the other one in the finance sector. The study contributes to research by summarising prior research on the analysis of business losses and by illustrating how the use of one method, business process analysis, assisted the client organisations. Perhaps most importantly, it identifies a new topic that has received very little attention in information systems research, despite its obvious managerial and practical significance.

Risks are part of every business activity and risk management is therefore essential in organizing business for success. Our paper describes a methodological framework for identifying and managing risks in the context of business process analysis. The method includes business process modeling and simulation not only to organize activities but also to locate errors and manage risks. Simulating business processes supports managers in compliance analysis by investigating different scenarios of norms and regulations. We adopt as a case study an healthcare application where risk management is even more important, because errors not only increase costs, reduce quality, and lead to delays, but can also lead to serious damages. This work demonstrate how to afford risk management by using modeling and computational simulation, also by improving regulatory compliance.

Organizations must comply with a number of external and internal regulations for business governance and must ensure that their processes are running accordingly to requirements of regulations. Therefore business process and regulations compliance analysis audit and management tasks take a very important role in daily operational activities for each organization. Due to high complexity this task can become challenging. In some domains regulations are changing rapidly. Process models must be flexible and easy adjustable to changing requirements, since the lack of ability to comply with regulations can lower down the competitiveness of an organizations. Thus, rapid changes of regulations require rapid changes of related business processes. The goal of the PhD work is to develop business process and regulations compliance management technology which should enable business process construction from regulations and change monitoring of regulations and business processes to ensure easy and rapid modification of business process model or regulations, thus also ensuring compliance.

One of the basic problems in semantic business management concerns the validation of semantic business processes. This paper introduces the Unary RDF Annotated Petri net systems as a formalism to model and analyze business processes with RDF annotations to deal with semantic information from both, data and control flow points of view. In addition, it shows how to use the reachability graph in order to analyze some behavioral business process properties including semantic aspects.

This paper is concerned with the application of Web services to distributed, cross-organizational business processes. In this scenario, it is crucial to answer the following questions: Do two Web services fit together in a way such that the composed system is deadlock-free? – the question of compatibility. Can one Web service be replaced by another while the remaining components stay untouched? – the question of equivalence. Can we reason about the soundness of one given Web service without considering the actual environment it will by used in?This paper defines the notion of usability – an intuitive and locally provable soundness criterion for a given Web services. Based on this notion, this paper demonstrates how the other questions could be answered. The presented method is based on Petri nets, because this formalism is widely used for modeling and analyzing business processes. Due to the existing Petri net semantics for BPEL4WS – a language that is in the very act of becoming the industrial standard for Web service based business processes – the results are directly applicable to real world examples.KeywordsBusiness Process ModelingWeb ServiceBPEL4WSTool based VerificationPetri nets

PurposeTo manage linkages amongst value activities, this study seeks to explore to a greater extent the underlying information‐processing infrastructure of the value chain, and then to derive a corresponding business process analysis framework.Design/methodology/approachThe approach is an in‐depth investigation of the information‐processing infrastructure underlying the value chain activities.FindingsThis study leads to the process‐wide information organism approach and further delivers a business process analysis framework for describing and measuring mechanisms of managing the information flow underlying the strategic business process.Originality/valueThe information‐processing infrastructure underlying the value chain and thus the business process has been identified, and an analytical framework for describing and measuring mechanisms of managing the information flow underlying the strategic business process has been proposed.

Web service composition involves the combination of a number of existing web services to create a value-added one. WS-BPEL is a promising language which describes Web service composition in form of business processes. However, WS-BPEL is an XML-based language and may suffer from ambiguities or some erroneous properties. The analysis and verification of business processes specified in WS-BPEL by a formal method has been a hot topic in the research community lately. In this paper, we propose a method to model and analyze WS-BPEL business processes based on ServiceNet, a special class of Petri nets. Unlike most of the existing work which analyze only control flow properties of WS-BPEL business processes but neglect data flow properties, our method models and analyzes both control properties and data properties of WS-BPEL business processes. We present the transformation rules of WS-BPEL business processes into ServiceNet and enrich the reduction rules of ServiceNet by applying them in some practical projects. Then the throughness of a business processes can be verified by reducing its ServiceNet representation based on some reduction rules. Moreover, we define some data-aspect properties of WS-BPEL business processes and give the corresponding checking algorithm.

Business processes and information systems mutually affect each other in non-trivial ways. Frequently, the business process design and the information system design are not well aligned. This means that business processes are designed without taking the information system impact into account, and vice versa. Missing alignment at design time often results in quality problems at runtime, such as large response times of information systems, large process execution times, overloaded information systems or interrupted processes. Aligning business process quality and information system quality at design time requires to
\nsolve the following problems (P). Business process quality and information system quality have to be characterized. P1: In contrast to information system quality, which is specified in the ISO/IEC 9126 standard, for example, there is no common and comprehensive understanding of business process quality. P2: Beyond that, current business process
\nmodeling notations do not aim to represent quality aspects. The impact of a business process on the quality of an information system, and vice versa, is unknown at design
\ntime. P3: The mutual impact between business processes and information systems must be predicted at design time.
\nIn this thesis, the Business Process Quality Reference-Model (BPQRM), a quality model for business processes, is introduced. The model allows for a comprehensive characterization of business process quality (P1). The BPQRM is applied successfully in a case study to
\nidentify potential for process quality improvement in practice. Based on the BPQRM an existing process modeling notation is extended by model elements to represent quality
\naspects (P2). Simulation is a powerful means to predict the impact of a business process on the quality of an information system, and vice versa, at design time. This thesis proposes two simulation approaches to predict the mutual impact between business processes and information systems, in terms of performance (P3). The approach Business
\nIT Impact Simulation (BIIS) defines interfaces between the business process simulation and the information system simulation. Performance-relevant information is exchanged
\nvia the interfaces between both simulations. Using business process simulation and information system simulation in isolation, workload burstiness is not adequately reflected.
\nThis is especially true for occasional, volatile peak loads. Workload burstiness can significantly affect the performance of business processes and information systems. The approach Integrated Business IT Impact Simulation (IntBIIS) for the integration of business processes and information systems in a single simulation allows for reflecting workload burstiness correctly. The simulation approaches support the comparison of design alternatives and the verification of a certain design against requirements. A case study confirms the feasibility in practice and the acceptance from practitioners’ point of
\nview.