Refactor Business Process Models with Maximized Parallelism

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.

Enhancing existing business process modeling languages with security concepts has attracted increased attention in research and several graphical notations and symbols have been proposed. How these extensions can be comprehended by users has not been evaluated yet. However, the comprehensibility of security concepts integrated within business process models is of utmost importance for many purposes such as communication, training, and later automation within a process-aware information system. If users do not understand the security concepts, this might lead to restricted acceptance or even misinterpretation and possible security problems in the sequel. In this paper, we evaluate existing security extensions of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) as BPMN constitutes the de facto standard in business modeling languages nowadays. The evaluation is conducted along two lines, i.e., a literature study and a survey. The findings of both evaluations identify shortcomings and open questions of existing approaches. This will yield the basis to convey security-related information within business process models in a comprehensible way and consequently, unleash the full effects of security modeling in business processes.

Communication flow orientation in business process modeling and its effect on redesign success: Results from a field study

The increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAISs) has resulted in a large number of implemented business processes. To react on changing needs, companies should be able to quickly adapt these process implementations if required. Current PAISs, however, only provide mechanisms to evolve the schema of a process model, but do not allow for the automated creation and adaptation of their user interfaces (UIs). The latter may have a complex logic and comprise, for example, conditional elements or database queries. Creating and evolving the UI components of a PAIS manually is a tedious and error-prone task. This technical report introduces a set of patterns for transforming fragments of a business process model, whose activities are performed by the same user role, to UI components of the PAIS. In particular, UI logic can be expressed using the same notation as for process modeling. Furthermore, a transformation method is introduced, which applies these patterns to automatically derive UI components from a process model by establishing a bidirectional mapping between process model and UI. This mapping allows propagating UI changes to the process model and vice versa. Overall, our approach enables process designers to rapidly develop and update complex UI components in PAISs.

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.

UPROM tool is a business process modeling tool designed to conduct business process and user requirements analysis in an integrated way to constitute a basis for process automation. Usually, business process models are not utilized systematically to develop related artifacts, specifically when a process-aware information system is to be developed to automate those processes. This results in completeness, consistency and maintainability problems for those artifacts. Unified business process modeling methodology, UPROM, is developed to integrate process modeling and practices. Enabling the application of UPROM, the tool provides editors for six different diagram types based on a common meta-model. It offers features so that modelers can develop a cohesive set of models. Using these models, UPROM tool can be used to automatically generate artifacts of user requirements document, COSMIC based software size estimation, process definition document and business glossary.

This chapter reveals the roles of business process modeling (BPM) and business process reengineering (BPR) in eGovernment, thus describing the concepts of eGovernment and BPM; BPM methodologies; business process modeling notation (BPMN); the importance of BPR in government-to-citizen (G2C) e-commerce; the relationship between BPM and eGovernment-based citizen satisfaction; the application of BPR in eGovernment; and the implementation of eGovernment through BPM. eGovernment is a modern trend that is driven by the advances in BPM and BPR as well as the aspirations of citizens who place increasing demands on governments' service. By modeling business processes in eGovernment, public sector organizations can achieve improvements in transparency and reduction in costs and resource requirements, resulting in improved business performance and compliance. The chapter argues that applying BPM and BPR in eGovernment has the potential to enhance public sector performance and achieve organizational goals in public sector organizations.

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.

Process-driven applications evolve rapidly through the interaction between executable BPMN (Business Process Modeling and Notation) models, business tasks, and external services. Given these components operate on some shared process data, it is imperative to recover the latent data by visiting relation, which is known as data flow among these tasks. Data flow will benefit some typical applications including data flow anomaly checking and data privacy protection. However, in most cases, the complete data flow in a business process is not explicitly defined but hidden in model elements such as form declarations, variable declarations, and program code. Some methods to recovering data flow based on process model analysis of source code have some drawbacks; i.e., for security reasons, users do not want to provide source code but only encapsulated methods; therefore, data flows are difficult to analyze. We propose a method to generate running logs that are used to produce a complete data flow picture combined with the static code analysis method. This method combines the simple and easy-to-use characteristics of static code analysis methods and makes up for the shortcomings of static code analysis methods that cannot adapt to complex business processes, and as a result, the analyzed data flow is inaccurate. Moreover, a holistic framework is proposed to generate the data flow graph. The prototype system designed on Camunda and Flowable BPM (business process management) engine proves the applicability of the solution. The effectiveness of our method is validated on the prototype system.

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 Process and Practice Alignment Meta-model

Business process modeling is an important part of organizational management since it enables companies to obtain insights into their operational workflows and find opportunities for development. However, evaluating and quantifying the similarity of multiple business process models can be difficult because these models frequently differ greatly in terms of structure and nomenclature. This study offers an approach that uses natural language processing techniques to evaluate the similarity of business process models in order to address this issue. The algorithm uses the activity labels given in the business process models as input to produce textual descriptions of the associated business processes. The algorithm includes various preprocessing stages to guarantee that the textual descriptions are correct and consistent. First, single words are retrieved and transformed to lower case from the resulting textual descriptions. After that, all non-alphabetic and stop words are removed from the retrieved words. The remaining words are then stemmed, which includes reducing them to their base form. The algorithm evaluates the similarity of distinct business process models using similarity measures, including Jaccard, Sorensen – Dice, overlap, and simple matching coefficients, after the textual descriptions have been prepared and preprocessed. These metrics provide a more detailed understanding of the similarities and differences across various business process models, which can then be used to influence decision-making and business process improvement initiatives. The software implementation of the proposed algorithm demonstrates its usage for similarity measurement in a database of business process models. Experiments show that the developed algorithm is 31% faster than a search based on the SQL LIKE clause and allows finding 18% more similar models in the business process model database.

Although Business process modelling is an increasingly popular research area for both organisations and enterprises due to its usefulness in optimizing resources management, business reengineering and business performance, it is not yet widely accepted in Small and Medium size Enterprises (SMEs), which are vital for sustainable economy development. The understanding of Business Process is an essential approach for an Organization to achieve set objectives and improve its operations. It has been able to show Business Analysts, and Managers where bottleneck exists in the system, how to optimize the Business Process to reduce cost of running the Organization, and the required resources needed for an Organization. This is clear for large scale organizations and enterprises but under research investigation for SMEs. Business Process Modelling (BPM) is a representation of the processes of the Organization. Several modelling techniques have been proposed and used to capture the characteristics of business processes. However, limited guidelines exist for selecting appropriate modelling techniques based on the characteristics of the problem and its requirements. This is even more accurate in the case of selecting proper BPM software tools to achieve those BPM modelling and simulation goals. This paper aims at presenting a comparative analysis of some relatively popular business process modelling techniques focusing on the associated software tools. The comparative framework proposed is based on the following major criteria: data flow capability, logical reasoning and understandability, specification of roles, and capability of simulation, flexibility and ease of use, simulation support and scope. However, the emphasis of this investigation is put on SME applicability of these tools and techniques. Therefore, the first goal is to define proper selection criteria for the application of BPM tools to SMEs. The proposed framework can serve as the basis for evaluating further modelling techniques and generating selection procedures focusing on a comparison of existing tools to implement these techniques properly for SMEs. This is to enable a potential user/modeller choose the right technique and tool in modelling critical SME Business Processes in order to analyse and optimize its operations.

This paper defines a model-driven approach for organizational engineering in which user interfaces of information systems are derived from business processes. This approach consists of four steps: business process modeling in the context of organizational engineering, task model derivation from the business process model, task refinement, and user interface model derivation from the task model. Each step contributes to specify and refine mappings between the source and the target model. In this way, each model modification could be adequately propagated in the rest of the chain. By applying this model-driven approach, the user interfaces of the information systems are directly meeting the requirements of the business processes and are no longer decoupled from them. This approach has been validated on a case study in a large bank-insurance company.

Recently, a variety of workflow patterns has been proposed focusing on specific aspects like control flow, data flow, and resource assignments. Though these patterns are relevant for implementing Business Process Modeling (BPM) tools and for evaluating the expressiveness of BPM languages, they do not contribute to reduce redundant specifications of recurrent business functions when modeling business processes. Furthermore, contemporary BPM tools do not support process designers in defining, querying, and reusing activity patterns as building blocks for process modeling. Related to these problems this paper proposes a set of activity patterns, evidences their practical relevance, and introduces a BPM tool for the modeling of business processes based on the reuse of these activity patterns. Altogether our approach fosters reuse of business function specifications and helps to improve the quality and comparability of business process models.