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Data in business processes
(2011)
Prozesse und Daten sind gleichermaßen wichtig für das Geschäftsprozessmanagement. Prozessdaten sind dabei insbesondere im Kontext der Automatisierung von Geschäftsprozessen, dem Prozesscontrolling und der Repräsentation der Vermögensgegenstände von Organisationen relevant. Es existieren viele Prozessmodellierungssprachen, von denen jede die Darstellung von Daten durch eine fest spezifizierte Menge an Modellierungskonstrukten ermöglicht. Allerdings unterscheiden sich diese Darstellungenund damit der Grad der Datenmodellierung stark untereinander. Dieser Report evaluiert verschiedene Prozessmodellierungssprachen bezüglich der Unterstützung von Datenmodellierung. Als einheitliche Grundlage entwickeln wir ein Framework, welches prozess- und datenrelevante Aspekte systematisch organisiert. Die Kriterien legen dabei das Hauptaugenmerk auf die datenrelevanten Aspekte. Nach Einführung des Frameworks vergleichen wir zwölf Prozessmodellierungssprachen gegen dieses. Wir generalisieren die Erkenntnisse aus den Vergleichen und identifizieren Cluster bezüglich des Grades der Datenmodellierung, in welche die einzelnen Sprachen eingeordnet werden.
The modeling and evaluation calculus FMC-QE, the Fundamental Modeling Concepts for Quanti-tative Evaluation [1], extends the Fundamental Modeling Concepts (FMC) for performance modeling and prediction. In this new methodology, the hierarchical service requests are in the main focus, because they are the origin of every service provisioning process. Similar to physics, these service requests are a tuple of value and unit, which enables hierarchical service request transformations at the hierarchical borders and therefore the hierarchical modeling. Through reducing the model complexity of the models by decomposing the system in different hierarchical views, the distinction between operational and control states and the calculation of the performance values on the assumption of the steady state, FMC-QE has a scalable applica-bility on complex systems. According to FMC, the system is modeled in a 3-dimensional hierarchical representation space, where system performance parameters are described in three arbitrarily fine-grained hierarchi-cal bipartite diagrams. The hierarchical service request structures are modeled in Entity Relationship Diagrams. The static server structures, divided into logical and real servers, are de-scribed as Block Diagrams. The dynamic behavior and the control structures are specified as Petri Nets, more precisely Colored Time Augmented Petri Nets. From the structures and pa-rameters of the performance model, a hierarchical set of equations is derived. The calculation of the performance values is done on the assumption of stationary processes and is based on fundamental laws of the performance analysis: Little's Law and the Forced Traffic Flow Law. Little's Law is used within the different hierarchical levels (horizontal) and the Forced Traffic Flow Law is the key to the dependencies among the hierarchical levels (vertical). This calculation is suitable for complex models and allows a fast (re-)calculation of different performance scenarios in order to support development and configuration decisions. Within the Research Group Zorn at the Hasso Plattner Institute, the work is embedded in a broader research in the development of FMC-QE. While this work is concentrated on the theoretical background, description and definition of the methodology as well as the extension and validation of the applicability, other topics are in the development of an FMC-QE modeling and evaluation tool and the usage of FMC-QE in the design of an adaptive transport layer in order to fulfill Quality of Service and Service Level Agreements in volatile service based environments. This thesis contains a state-of-the-art, the description of FMC-QE as well as extensions of FMC-QE in representative general models and case studies. In the state-of-the-art part of the thesis in chapter 2, an overview on existing Queueing Theory and Time Augmented Petri Net models and other quantitative modeling and evaluation languages and methodologies is given. Also other hierarchical quantitative modeling frameworks will be considered. The description of FMC-QE in chapter 3 consists of a summary of the foundations of FMC-QE, basic definitions, the graphical notations, the FMC-QE Calculus and the modeling of open queueing networks as an introductory example. The extensions of FMC-QE in chapter 4 consist of the integration of the summation method in order to support the handling of closed networks and the modeling of multiclass and semaphore scenarios. Furthermore, FMC-QE is compared to other performance modeling and evaluation approaches. In the case study part in chapter 5, proof-of-concept examples, like the modeling of a service based search portal, a service based SAP NetWeaver application and the Axis2 Web service framework will be provided. Finally, conclusions are given by a summary of contributions and an outlook on future work in chapter 6. [1] Werner Zorn. FMC-QE - A New Approach in Quantitative Modeling. In Hamid R. Arabnia, editor, Procee-dings of the International Conference on Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Methods (MSV 2007) within WorldComp ’07, pages 280 – 287, Las Vegas, NV, USA, June 2007. CSREA Press. ISBN 1-60132-029-9.
CSOM/PL is a software product line (SPL) derived from applying multi-dimensional separation of concerns (MDSOC) techniques to the domain of high-level language virtual machine (VM) implementations. For CSOM/PL, we modularised CSOM, a Smalltalk VM implemented in C, using VMADL (virtual machine architecture description language). Several features of the original CSOM were encapsulated in VMADL modules and composed in various combinations. In an evaluation of our approach, we show that applying MDSOC and SPL principles to a domain as complex as that of VMs is not only feasible but beneficial, as it improves understandability, maintainability, and configurability of VM implementations without harming performance.
Integrated real-time visualisation of massive 3D-Point clouds and geo-referenced textured dates
(2011)
Modern communication systems are becoming increasingly dynamic and complex. In this article a novel mechanism for next generation charging and billing is presented that enables self-configurability for accounting systems consisting of heterogeneous components. The mechanism is required to be simple, effective, efficient, scalable and fault-tolerant. Based on simulation results it is shown that the proposed simple distributed mechanism is competitive with usual cost-based or random mechanisms under realistic assumptions and up to non-extreme workload situations as well as fulfilling the posed requirements.
The importance of reporting is ever increasing in today's fast-paced market environments and the availability of up-to-date information for reporting has become indispensable. Current reporting systems are separated from the online transaction processing systems (OLTP) with periodic updates pushed in. A pre-defined and aggregated subset of the OLTP data, however, does not provide the flexibility, detail, and timeliness needed for today's operational reporting. As technology advances, this separation has to be re-evaluated and means to study and evaluate new trends in data storage management have to be provided. This article proposes a benchmark for combined OLTP and operational reporting, providing means to evaluate the performance of enterprise data management systems for mixed workloads of OLTP and operational reporting queries. Such systems offer up-to-date information and the flexibility of the entire data set for reporting. We describe how the benchmark provokes the conflicts that are the reason for separating the two workloads on different systems. In this article, we introduce the concepts, logical data schema, transactions and queries of the benchmark, which are entirely based on the original data sets and real workloads of existing, globally operating enterprises.
Context-oriented programming (COP) provides dedicated support for defining and composing variations to a basic program behavior. A variation, which is defined within a layer, can be de-/activated for the dynamic extent of a code block. While this mechanism allows for control flow-specific scoping, expressing behavior adaptations can demand alternative scopes. For instance, adaptations can depend on dynamic object structure rather than control flow. We present scenarios for behavior adaptation and identify the need for new scoping mechanisms. The increasing number of scoping mechanisms calls for new language abstractions representing them. We suggest to open the implementation of scoping mechanisms so that developers can extend the COP language core according to their specific needs. Our open implementation moves layer composition into objects to be affected and with that closer to the method dispatch to be changed. We discuss the implementation of established COP scoping mechanisms using our approach and present new scoping mechanisms developed for our enhancements to Lively Kernel.
The next generation of advanced mechatronic systems is expected to enhance their functionality and improve their performance by context-dependent behavior. Therefore, these systems require to represent information about their complex environment and changing sets of collaboration partners internally. This requirement is in contrast to the usually assumed static structures of embedded systems. In this paper, we present a model-driven approach which overcomes this situation by supporting dynamic data structures while still guaranteeing that valid worst-case execution times can be derived. It supports a flexible resource manager which avoids to operate with the prohibitive coarse worst-case boundaries but instead supports to run applications in different profiles which guarantee different resource requirements and put unused resources in a profile at other applications' disposal. By supporting the proper estimation of worst case execution time (WCET) and worst case number of iteration (WCNI) at runtime, we can further support to create new profiles, add or remove them at runtime in order to minimize the over-approximation of the resource consumption resulting from the dynamic data structures required for the outlined class of advanced systems.
With the rise of electronic integration between organizations, the need for a precise specification of interaction behavior increases. Information systems, replacing interaction previously carried out by humans via phone, faxes and emails, require a precise specification for handling all possible situations. Such interaction behavior is described in process choreographies. While many proposals for choreography languages have already been made, most of them fall into the category of interconnection models, where the observable behavior of the different partners is described and then related via message flow. As this article will show, this modeling approach fails to support fundamental design principles of choreographies and typically leads to modeling errors. This motivates an alternative modeling style, namely interaction modeling, for overcoming these limitations. While the main concepts are independent of a concrete modeling language, iBPMN is introduced as novel interaction modeling language. Formal execution semantics are provided and a comprehensive toolset implementing the approach is presented.
A business process is a set of steps designed to be executed in a certain order to achieve a business value. Such processes are often driven by and documented using process models. Nowadays, process models are also applied to drive process execution. Thus, correctness of business process models is a must. Much of the work has been devoted to check general, domain-independent correctness criteria, such as soundness. However, business processes must also adhere to and show compliance with various regulations and constraints, the so-called compliance requirements. These are domain-dependent requirements.
In many situations, verifying compliance on a model level is of great value, since violations can be resolved in an early stage prior to execution. However, this calls for using formal verification techniques, e.g., model checking, that are too complex for business experts to apply. In this paper, we utilize a visual language. BPMN-Q to express compliance requirements visually in a way similar to that used by business experts to build process models. Still, using a pattern based approach, each BPMN-Qgraph has a formal temporal logic expression in computational tree logic (CTL). Moreover, the user is able to express constraints, i.e., compliance rules, regarding control flow and data flow aspects. In order to provide valuable feedback to a user in case of violations, we depend on temporal logic querying approaches as well as BPMN-Q to visually highlight paths in a process model whose execution causes violations.
Analysis of behavioural consistency is an important aspect of software engineering. In process and service management, consistency verification of behavioural models has manifold applications. For instance, a business process model used as system specification and a corresponding workflow model used as implementation have to be consistent. Another example would be the analysis to what degree a process log of executed business operations is consistent with the corresponding normative process model. Typically, existing notions of behaviour equivalence, such as bisimulation and trace equivalence, are applied as consistency notions. Still, these notions are exponential in computation and yield a Boolean result. In many cases, however, a quantification of behavioural deviation is needed along with concepts to isolate the source of deviation.
In this article, we propose causal behavioural profiles as the basis for a consistency notion. These profiles capture essential behavioural information, such as order, exclusiveness, and causality between pairs of activities of a process model. Consistency based on these profiles is weaker than trace equivalence, but can be computed efficiently for a broad class of models. In this article, we introduce techniques for the computation of causal behavioural profiles using structural decomposition techniques for sound free-choice workflow systems if unstructured net fragments are acyclic or can be traced back to S-or T-nets. We also elaborate on the findings of applying our technique to three industry model collections.
Process compliance measurement is getting increasing attention in companies due to stricter legal requirements and market pressure for operational excellence. In order to judge on compliance of the business processing, the degree of behavioural deviation of a case, i.e., an observed execution sequence, is quantified with respect to a process model (referred to as fitness, or recall). Recently, different compliance measures have been proposed. Still, nearly all of them are grounded on state-based techniques and the trace equivalence criterion, in particular. As a consequence, these approaches have to deal with the state explosion problem. In this paper, we argue that a behavioural abstraction may be leveraged to measure the compliance of a process log - a collection of cases. To this end, we utilise causal behavioural profiles that capture the behavioural characteristics of process models and cases, and can be computed efficiently. We propose different compliance measures based on these profiles, discuss the impact of noise in process logs on our measures, and show how diagnostic information on non-compliance is derived. As a validation, we report on findings of applying our approach in a case study with an international service provider.
Business processes are commonly modeled using a graphical modeling language. The most widespread notation for this purpose is business process diagrams in the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). In this article, we use the visual query language BPMN-Q for expressing patterns that are related to possible problems in such business process diagrams. We discuss two classes of problems that can be found frequently in real-world models: sequence flow errors and model fragments that can make the model difficult to understand.
By using a query processor, a business process modeler is able to identify possible errors in business process diagrams. Moreover, the erroneous parts of the business process diagram can be highlighted when an instance of an error pattern is found. This way, the modeler gets an easy-to-understand feedback in the visual modeling language he or she is familiar with. This is an advantage over current validation methods, which usually lack this kind of intuitive feedback.
In this article, we aim to evaluate the influences of different propagation models on the results of V2X simulations. First, we analyze how the models free space propagation, Rayleigh fading, and Ricean fading in synthetic scenarios with and without background communication influence the simulation of communication in general. After that, we investigate the impact of the models on the simulated behavior of a V2X traffic efficiency application in a real inner city scenario. Our results show that the selection of the propagation model affects the number of delivered messages, but exerts no significant influence on the simulated effectiveness of a V2X traffic efficiency application in urban areas. Under those circumstances, a simplified propagation model is sufficient.
Logic synthesis of speed independent circuits based on signal transition graph (STG) decomposition is a promising approach to tackle complexity problems like state-space explosion. Unfortunately, decomposition can result in components that in isolation have irreducible complete state coding conflicts. In earlier work, the authors showed how to resolve such conflicts by introducing internal communication between components, but only for very restricted specification structures. Here, they improve their former work by presenting algorithms for identifying delay transitions and inserting gyroscopes for specifications having a much more general structure. Thus, the authors are now able to synthesise controllers from real-life specifications. For all algorithms, they present correctness proofs and show their successful application to benchmarks, including very complex STGs arising in the context of control resynthesis.
Business Process Management (BPM) emerged as a means to control, analyse, and optimise business operations. Conceptual models are of central importance for BPM. Most prominently, process models define the behaviour that is performed to achieve a business value. In essence, a process model is a mapping of properties of the original business process to the model, created for a purpose. Different modelling purposes, therefore, result in different models of a business process. Against this background, the misalignment of process models often observed in the field of BPM is no surprise. Even if the same business scenario is considered, models created for strategic decision making differ in content significantly from models created for process automation. Despite their differences, process models that refer to the same business process should be consistent, i.e., free of contradictions. Apparently, there is a trade-off between strictness of a notion of consistency and appropriateness of process models serving different purposes. Existing work on consistency analysis builds upon behaviour equivalences and hierarchical refinements between process models. Hence, these approaches are computationally hard and do not offer the flexibility to gradually relax consistency requirements towards a certain setting. This thesis presents a framework for the analysis of behaviour consistency that takes a fundamentally different approach. As a first step, an alignment between corresponding elements of related process models is constructed. Then, this thesis conducts behavioural analysis grounded on a relational abstraction of the behaviour of a process model, its behavioural profile. Different variants of these profiles are proposed, along with efficient computation techniques for a broad class of process models. Using behavioural profiles, consistency of an alignment between process models is judged by different notions and measures. The consistency measures are also adjusted to assess conformance of process logs that capture the observed execution of a process. Further, this thesis proposes various complementary techniques to support consistency management. It elaborates on how to implement consistent change propagation between process models, addresses the exploration of behavioural commonalities and differences, and proposes a model synthesis for behavioural profiles.
Business process models are used within a range of organizational initiatives, where every stakeholder has a unique perspective on a process and demands the respective model. As a consequence, multiple process models capturing the very same business process coexist. Keeping such models in sync is a challenge within an ever changing business environment: once a process is changed, all its models have to be updated. Due to a large number of models and their complex relations, model maintenance becomes error-prone and expensive. Against this background, business process model abstraction emerged as an operation reducing the number of stored process models and facilitating model management. Business process model abstraction is an operation preserving essential process properties and leaving out insignificant details in order to retain information relevant for a particular purpose. Process model abstraction has been addressed by several researchers. The focus of their studies has been on particular use cases and model transformations supporting these use cases. This thesis systematically approaches the problem of business process model abstraction shaping the outcome into a framework. We investigate the current industry demand in abstraction summarizing it in a catalog of business process model abstraction use cases. The thesis focuses on one prominent use case where the user demands a model with coarse-grained activities and overall process ordering constraints. We develop model transformations that support this use case starting with the transformations based on process model structure analysis. Further, abstraction methods considering the semantics of process model elements are investigated. First, we suggest how semantically related activities can be discovered in process models-a barely researched challenge. The thesis validates the designed abstraction methods against sets of industrial process models and discusses the method implementation aspects. Second, we develop a novel model transformation, which combined with the related activity discovery allows flexible non-hierarchical abstraction. In this way this thesis advocates novel model transformations that facilitate business process model management and provides the foundations for innovative tool support.
The World Wide Web as an application platform becomes increasingly important. However, the development of Web applications is often more complex than for the desktop. Web-based development environments like Lively Webwerkstatt can mitigate this problem by making the development process more interactive and direct. By moving the development environment into the Web, applications can be developed collaboratively in a Wiki-like manner. This report documents the results of the project seminar on Web-based Development Environments 2010. In this seminar, participants extended the Web-based development environment Lively Webwerkstatt. They worked in small teams on current research topics from the field of Web-development and tool support for programmers and implemented their results in the Webwerkstatt environment.
Version Control Systems (VCS) allow developers to manage changes to software artifacts. Developers interact with VCSs through a variety of client programs, such as graphical front-ends or command line tools. It is desirable to use the same version control client program against different VCSs. Unfortunately, no established abstraction over VCS concepts exists. Instead, VCS client programs implement ad-hoc solutions to support interaction with multiple VCSs. This thesis presents Pur, an abstraction over version control concepts that allows building rich client programs that can interact with multiple VCSs. We provide an implementation of this abstraction and validate it by implementing a client application.
In current practice, business processes modeling is done by trained method experts. Domain experts are interviewed to elicit their process information but not involved in modeling. We created a haptic toolkit for process modeling that can be used in process elicitation sessions with domain experts. We hypothesize that this leads to more effective process elicitation. This paper brakes down "effective elicitation" to 14 operationalized hypotheses. They are assessed in a controlled experiment using questionnaires, process model feedback tests and video analysis. The experiment compares our approach to structured interviews in a repeated measurement design. We executed the experiment with 17 student clerks from a trade school. They represent potential users of the tool. Six out of fourteen hypotheses showed significant difference due to the method applied. Subjects reported more fun and more insights into process modeling with tangible media. Video analysis showed significantly more reviews and corrections applied during process elicitation. Moreover, people take more time to talk and think about their processes. We conclude that tangible media creates a different working mode for people in process elicitation with fun, new insights and instant feedback on preliminary results.