Research on Business Processes with Semantic Web Technologies

PurposeThis paper presents M-PoP, a method to model large, complex, and dynamic business processes. These processes have sometimes resulted from alliances of organizations (i.e. joint ventures and mergers and acquisitions) and are referred to as Processes-of-Business Processes (PoP). Due to the difficulty of modeling these dynamic processes, alliances of organizations have often lost opportunities, competitiveness, and profitability, so requiring suitable modeling methods.Design/methodology/approachThe authors proposed M-PoP that can model PoP through three views in different abstraction levels and using well-known techniques in industry and academia, mainly those from Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). For this, M-PoP presents three main steps: identification of PoP elements, modeling of PoP, and verification of PoP models. To evaluate M-PoP, we applied it in a real-world business process in the health domain.FindingsThe evaluation results point out the capability and viability of M-PoP to deal with dynamic business processes.Research limitations/implicationsM-PoP still needs to be applied in various real-world scenarios to gather evidence of its productivity, efficiency, and scalability.Practical implicationsThis novel method could change the way organizations model their business processes and, as a consequence, it could leverage strategic business opportunities.Originality/valueM-PoP is the first method that makes it possible to model large and complex business processes and, most importantly, dynamic processes.

Dynamic and flexible systems offer huge advantages for businesses in addressing dynamic uncertain factors and implementing dynamic business processes (DBP). However, DBP remains a challenge from the perspectives of modeling, simulation, and implementation because of a nontrivial understanding of “What is a dynamic business process?” A variety of approaches for DBP modeling and implementation have been proposed over the past years, yet few comprehensive studies analyzing DBP from different particular perspectives (e.g., business process (BP) variability, aspect oriented BP, service compositions, etc.) and research questions that lay the foundation for the development of a meaning of a DBP have been reported. The motivation behind this review is to examine DBP meaning from a global perspective and, consequently, answer the previously presented research question. Therefore, in this paper, we present a systematic literature review (SLR) comprised of 67 papers from five respective digital libraries, which index Computer Science (CS), Information Systems (IS), and Software Engineering (SE) journals and conference proceedings. Two points of view are analyzed in the selected papers. First, we observe the similarities and differences between the proposed approaches to DBP modeling and implementation. From these observations, we define six main requirements for DBP (DBPR). In addition, the comparison of the selected papers according to DBPR shows that most of the approaches analyzed limit BP dynamicity, since they use partially predefined BP models. Secondly, we analyze the papers based on a visualization perspective that shows the less explored areas as follows: more flexible process modeling approach and its implementation in IS should be developed; usage of historic data should be extended; domain knowledge usage, like goal-orientation, multi-criteria optimization, domain knowledge, artificial intelligence, etc., should be included and extended to ensure BP dynamicity. As such, this study makes important contributions and serves as a useful resource for future DBP studies and practice. Moreover, we expect that our results could inspire researchers and practitioners towards further work aimed at bringing forward the field of DBP modeling and implementation.

Business process management systems such as the workflow management system and the enterprise application integration system manage process flow on a minute-by-minute basis in various application domains. In the conventional approach, the business process must be predefined before it is implemented. However, involving business users in the early stage of the design phase is neither efficient nor realistic in the dynamic business world. This study proposes a framework to implement a dynamic business process in the P2P Semantic Web, which provides the flexibility to dynamically alter business process and to take semantic data into consideration. The system is demonstrated by a case of a manufacturer that is processing an order.

In this chapter we deal with testing of business processes implemented using computer systems. We have discussed challenges associated with business process testing, identified aspects of business processes that need to be tested and capabilities that the testing tool(s) or environment should have in order to perform such testing. The chapter also discusses a commonly used software testing methodology in light business process testing for provisioning of structured mechanism for business process testing. One of the aspects of managing complex and dynamic business processes is making sure that the process delivers what is required of it at all times. Dynamics of the business may require frequent changes in the business process and whenever such changes takes place there is a need to test the process thoroughly to ascertain that the process is still working according to the requirements laid down for it. This becomes even more important if the business process is implemented using computer systems since over a period of time the computer software becomes more prone to error as it is updated frequently to accommodate the business changes hence the requirement for testing complex business processes.

Generally, the environment and enterprises' condition are not stable, in order to promote the enterprises' competitive power, mangers must continuously improve the business processes' performance. Based on the simulation method and multi-objective optimization theory, the thesis builds a dynamic multi-objective optimization model for business process optimization. Firstly the framework of optimization model is introduced, the framework include logic of the simulation process and parameters' selection. Secondly, a business process's performance review model is given for evaluation, and also point out that there is a balanced point among time, cost and quality, and the point can help us to find the optimal design of business process. Finally, the thesis provide a experiment to verify the validity of the model put forward by the thesis, and the result prove that the model is effective in optimization of business process.

Nowadays, Petri net models have been used as a very promising modelling tool for systems and it presents randomness, concurrency, and synchronisation. Many researchers give attention to Petri nets because of its wide utilization. Therefore, reusability, sharing, and standardization are three functions that Petri nets must have. To actualized this concept, Semantic Web technologies can be implemented. One of the Semantic Web technologies is Ontology. In this paper, a formal approach for representing a business process in Petri nets into Ontologies is proposed. Firstly, a business process in Petri nets is presented. Then, formal definitions of Petri nets and OWL DL ontologies are introduced. Next step, converting a business process in Petri nets into OWL DL ontologies. Finally, using SPARQL Query in OWL DL ontologies to make sure that the relations of the business process in Petri nets are the same as the relations of the business process in OWL DL ontologies.

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 management (BPM) is the management of IT-supported business operations from a business expert's process view rather than from a technical perspective. The application of SW technologies to BPM has gained interest in both the academic and corporate sector. The most significant issue facing BPM is the integration of business processes in a dynamic environment with an IT system in order to adequately represent business operations and needs. In this paper, we describe how semantic Web technologies and business processes have been combined in order to construct an architecture for business process management, and we present a new framework for increasing exibility and adaptively of business processes, annotating semantic business process artifacts on all modeling levels, and advancing BPM towards knowledge-intensive processes.

The highly competitive and rapidly changing nature of the current business environment creates tremendous pressure on organizations to collaborate. This led to utterly different type of business eco-system in which individual organizations in collaborative business services increasingly demand for a collaborative business process that can easily adapt to changes. As a result, the development and management of organization's IT infrastructures that can able to cope up with the requirements of dynamic and flexible business environments are challenging. Service-based approach can enhance the development and management of collaborative processes through service abstraction to satisfy the needs of today's dynamic business environment. Service-oriented computing paradigm uses service models to represent the requirements of continuously changing business needs through service abstraction and use platform independent interaction nature of web service and its enabling available technologies for implementation. Hence, in this paper we discussed the collaborative BPM trends and concepts, technologies and proposed a generic framework to realize automatic conversion of service models into Web services in order to support dynamic and adaptive development of collaborative business process and deploy them over the internet through a web service standards platform.

This paper presents the DFM notation and its operational semantics. DFM (document flow model) is a message-based workflow notation for modelling asynchronous Web services communication, which uses coordination mechanisms to support dynamic configurations and long-running business processes. The operational semantics of a DFM specification describes the possible behaviours of a system of interrelated Web services, in terms of the messages that can be exchanged during the execution of one or more business processes, and the effect each message execution has on the business process state.

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.

Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences: a review of the state of the art

The article explores the vital subject of optimizing business process management, which is essential for enhancing the efficiency and competitiveness of enterprises. The study evaluates various perspectives, including economic, engineering, and managerial aspects, and underscores the importance of mathematical models over descriptive models in achieving precise and effective optimization. Descriptive models, despite their widespread use, do not guarantee optimal outcomes. The article emphasizes the need for mathematical models to accurately optimize business processes, considering various criteria and constraints. This approach aims to address the limitations of current descriptive models and advocates for the development of specific mathematical models to manage business process optimization under uncertainty. Key findings reveal that optimization in business process management has a significant impact on enterprise efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness. The process approach, which concentrates on enhancing individual business processes, is highlighted as a crucial paradigm in modern management. The research calls for further investigations to develop mathematical models that can deliver more reliable and precise optimization results, especially in uncertain conditions. In conclusion, the article supports the transition from descriptive to mathematical models in optimizing business process management to achieve maximum efficiency and competitiveness in enterprises. Future research will focus on developing mathematical optimization models for business processes, particularly those related to new product development under uncertain conditions. This shift is anticipated to offer more accurate and effective solutions for optimizing business processes in a dynamic and unpredictable business environment. Furthermore, the article highlights the need for continuous development and application of mathematical approaches to ensure that business processes are optimized effectively. It stresses the importance of incorporating various optimization criteria and constraints to achieve the best possible outcomes. By transitioning to mathematical models, businesses can better navigate the complexities and uncertainties inherent in today's competitive landscape, leading to improved performance and sustainable growth.

IT-enabled redesign of complex and dynamic business processes: the case of bank credit evaluation

In order to survive in highly competitive business environments, companies have to continuously change their business processes. It is apparent that developing dynamic models of business processes prior to their change could increase the success of reengineering projects. This research investigates a suitability of business process modelling tool ARIS for dynamic modelling of business processes. Information system modelling and simulation modelling are discussed from the business process change perspective. An example of business process modelling in Croatian insurance company is provided.