Process Query Language: A Way to Make Workflow Processes More Flexible

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.

The execution of workflow processes requires authorizations for enforcing the assignment of tasks to participants according to the security, functionality and management policies of an organization. A role-based authorization model is commonly adopted in most workflow systems and has become a research topic in the area of workflow. However, the existing role-based access control models cannot assign tasks to right participants according to the context in workflow activities. Therefore, this method lacks flexible and dynamic allotment capability and cannot meet the requirements of complex business processes during the runtime of workflow instances. In this paper a dynamic workflow authorization method based on participants' expression rules is proposed. In the period of process modeling, this method, which applies some expression rules into the participant of each activity, can resolve the problem of dynamic authorization of the tasks during the runtime of workflow instances. The method also supports the least privilege policies and the policies of separation of duties, and achieves the definition of complex business processes, meanwhile enhances the flexibility of workflow participant definition. At last, the demonstration of reimbursement application process is also presented to testify the practicability and strong expression ability.

Summary form only given. Workflow management systems (WfMSs) are usually designed to run with the workflow (process) definitions and artifact definitions from repository. The static characteristics for process definitions might reduce the practicability of the systems. The cost to develop a WfMS is so high that it is reasonable to take the flexibility of system architecture into account. In this paper, we present an approach to adapt to dynamic changes on workflow definitions with agents. In our agent-based workflow system, the definition of a workflow can be modified by the agent itself. Therefore, agents can modify their guidance for workers, and the system is more flexible to meet the specification modification.

In the design process of the planetary gear transmission, it is necessary to acquire its motion law, dynamics characteristics and structural strength, etc. In order to improve the work efficiency, how to make sure the correct sequence among many kinds of simulations and the proper relationship between all simulation data has become more and more important. Based on the workflow technology, a simulation flow management system for planetary gear transmission is proposed. And the functional framework and the technical architecture of this system have been established. The management system abides by the workflow reference model which is provided by the Workflow Management Coalition(WfMC); while the flow files can be acquired based on XML Process Definition Language(XPDL). Furthermore, the Relational DataBase (RDB) is adopted to manage control data of flow and the simulation data files can be managed by folder system. At last, an engineering application demonstrated that the simulation flow management system can control analysis process conveniently, manage simulation data effectively and improve work efficiency markedly.

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.

The daily operation of organizations leaves a trail of the execution of business processes (BPs) including activities, events and decisions taken by participants. %, as a basis for process improvement. Compliance requirements add specific control elements to process execution, e.g. domain and/or country regulations to be fulfilled, enforcing order of interaction messages or activities, or security checks on roles and permissions. As the amount of available data in organizations grows everyday, using execution data to detect compliance violations and its causes, can help organizations to take corrective actions for improving their processes and comply to applying rules. Compliance requirements violations can be detected at runtime to prevent further execution, or in a post mortem way using Process Mining to evaluate process execution data against the specified compliance requirements for the process. In this paper we present a BP compliance Requirements Model (BPCRM) defining generic compliance controls that can be used to specify specific compliance requirements over BPs, that are used as input to assess compliance violations with process mining. This model can be seen as a catalogue that includes a set of predefined compliance rules or patterns in one place, helping organizations to specify and evaluate the compliance of their processes.

Management of interactive business processes in decentralized service infrastructures through event processing

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.

Workflow management systems help to execute, monitor and manage work process flow and execution. These systems, as they are executing, keep a record of who does what and when (e.g. log of events). The activity of using computer software to examine these records, and deriving various structural data results is called workflow mining. The workflow mining activity, in general, needs to encompass behavioral (process/control-flow), social, informational (data-flow), and organizational perspectives; as well as other perspectives, because workflow systems are "people systems" that must be designed, deployed, and understood within their social and organizational contexts. This paper particularly focuses on mining the behavioral aspect of workflows from XML-based workflow enactment event logs, which are vertically (semantic-driven distribution) or horizontally (syntactic-driven distribution) distributed over the networked workflow enactment components. That is, this paper proposes distributed workflow mining approaches that are able to rediscover ICN-based structured workflow process models through incrementally amalgamating a series of vertically or horizontally fragmented temporal workcases. And each of the approaches consists of a temporal fragment discovery algorithm, which is able to discover a set of temporal fragment models from the fragmented workflow enactment event logs, and a workflow process mining algorithm which rediscovers a structured workflow process model from the discovered temporal fragment models. Where, the temporal fragment model represents the concrete model of the XML-based distributed workflow fragment events log.

A business process (workflow) is an assembly of tasks to accomplish a business goal. Real-world workflow models often demanded to change due to new laws and policies, changes in the environment, and so on. To understand the inner workings of a business process to facilitate changes, workflow logs have the potential to enable inspecting, monitoring, diagnosing, analyzing, and improving the design of a complex workflow. Querying workflow logs, however, is still mostly an ad hoc practice by workflow managers. In this article, we focus on the problem of querying workflow log concerning both control flow and dataflow properties. We develop a query language based on “incident patterns” to allow the user to directly query workflow logs instead of having to transform such queries into database operations. We provide the formal semantics and a query evaluation algorithm of our language. By deriving an accurate cost model, we develop an optimization mechanism to accelerate query evaluation. Our experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the optimization and achieves up to 50× speedup over an adaption of existing evaluation method.

Self-adaptive execution of workflow processes by dynamically and autonomously updating their decisions is especially important for improving the quality of business management. However, the existing methods neglect the impacts of data relationships and temporal constraints on modeling and execution of workflow processes. In this article, based on sprouting graph we propose a new approach for self-adaptive decision-making for dynamic execution of data-aware workflow processes. First, a data-oriented sprouting graph is developed for retrieving information on data-aware workflow processes, so as to eliminate incorrect paths and handle waiting situations. Second, decision point setting and self-adaptive decision strategies are investigated for solving two fundamental decision problems: waiting for information and selecting one among several paths. Third, the whole procedure of automatic implementation is proposed for self-adaptive execution of data-aware workflow processes. Compared with the existing methods, our approach can improve the efficiency of analysis by reducing the model size and can significantly minimize the overall operational cost of the workflow processes.

Based on the workflow management coalition (WFMC) standard and component software technologies, this paper addresses our Petri-nets-based approach for workflow and process automation. Petri nets provide graphical and mathematical formalisms for work-flow process definition and analysis. In this paper, we will present how to use Petri nets and a toolkit NCUPN (National Central University Petri Nets toolkit) for process definition and analysis. NCUPN is a Petri nets modeling and analysis toolkit developed to help software engineers in drawing and doing analysis. Once a workflow process is drawn using NCUPN, analysis can be done automatically. In this paper, we will demonstrate how to use NCUPN to analyze behavioral properties of workflow process, such as deadlock, liveness, safety, and starvation.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to assess the state of the art of social business process management (Social BPM), explaining applied approaches, existing tools and challenges and to propose a research agenda for encouraging further development of the area.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology comprises a qualitative analysis using secondary data. The approach relies on searches of scientific papers conducted in well-known databases, identifying research work related to Social BPM solutions and those contributing with social characteristics to BPM. Based on the identified papers, the authors selected the most relevant and the latest publications, and categorized their contributions and findings based on open and selective coding. In total, the analysis is based on 51 papers that were selected and analyzed in depth.FindingsMain results show that there are several studies investigating modeling approaches for socializing process activities and for capturing implicit knowledge possessed and used by process actors, enabling to add some kind of flexibility to business processes. However, despite the proven interest in the area, there are not yet adequate tools providing effective solutions for Social BPM. Based on our findings, the authors propose a research agenda comprising three main lines: contributions of social software (SS) to Social BPM, Social BPM as a mechanism for adding flexibility to and for discovering new business processes and Social BPM for enhancing business processes with the use of new technologies. The authors also identify relevant problems for each line.Practical implicationsSome SS tools, like wikis, enable managing social aspects in executing business processes and can be used to coordinate simple business processes. Despite they are commonly used, they are not yet mature tools supporting Social BPM and more efficient tools are yet to appear. The lack of tools preclude organizations from benefitting from implicit knowledge owned by and shared among business process actors, which could contribute to better-informed decisions related to organizational processes. In addition, more research is needed for considering Social BPM as an approach for organizations to benefit from the adoption of new technologies in their business processes.Originality/valueThe paper assesses the state of the art in Social BPM, an incipient area in research and practice. The area can be defined as the intersection of two bigger areas highly relevant for organizations; on the one hand, the management and execution of business processes; and on the other hand, the use of social software, including social media tools, for leveraging on implicit knowledge shared by business process actors to improving efficiency of business processes.

Summary form only given. This poster presents an experience, on gathering business needs in business models adapted to the business expert language and translating these needs into a service oriented architecture (SOA) in a systematic way. The poster introduces the current situation highlighting three interoperability problems: (1) Organisations do not use a standard, unified and widely adopted business process definition language. Organisations want a common understanding of the process where they are involved from different perspectives; (2) Information systems are implemented to address specific requirements, ignoring future integration needs by using proprietary formats, and ad-hoc communication strategies and protocols; and (3) Information systems do not, clearly, support the business processes. There is a gap between business process models and their information systems implementations. The approach shown in this poster is based on the usage of the SOA paradigm from a model driven point of view: a model driven service oriented architecture (MDSOA) framework. Based on the MDA specification we have identified a metamodel for each of the three abstraction levels: (1) POP* (process, organisation, product) is selected as the metamodel to represent and exchange business processes. POP* is the unified enterprise modelling language (UEML) successor. POP* metamodel represents the starting point; (2) PIM4SOA (platform independent model for service oriented architecture) (Benguria et al., 2006) is a metamodel to represent service, process, information and quality of service elements; and (3) WSDL (Web service description language) and BPEL (business process execution language) are platform specific languages