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First come, first served: Critical choices between alternative actions are often made based on events external to an organization, and reacting promptly to their occurrence can be a major advantage over the competition. In Business Process Management (BPM), such deferred choices can be expressed in process models, and they are an important aspect of process engines. Blockchain-based process execution approaches are no exception to this, but are severely limited by the inherent properties of the platform: The isolated environment prevents direct access to external entities and data, and the non-continual runtime based entirely on atomic transactions impedes the monitoring and detection of events. In this paper we provide an in-depth examination of the semantics of deferred choice, and transfer them to environments such as the blockchain. We introduce and compare several oracle architectures able to satisfy certain requirements, and show that they can be implemented using state-of-the-art blockchain technology.
Which event happened first?
(2021)
First come, first served: Critical choices between alternative actions are often made based on events external to an organization, and reacting promptly to their occurrence can be a major advantage over the competition. In Business Process Management (BPM), such deferred choices can be expressed in process models, and they are an important aspect of process engines. Blockchain-based process execution approaches are no exception to this, but are severely limited by the inherent properties of the platform: The isolated environment prevents direct access to external entities and data, and the non-continual runtime based entirely on atomic transactions impedes the monitoring and detection of events. In this paper we provide an in-depth examination of the semantics of deferred choice, and transfer them to environments such as the blockchain. We introduce and compare several oracle architectures able to satisfy certain requirements, and show that they can be implemented using state-of-the-art blockchain technology.
Process models specify behavioral execution constraints between activities as well as between activities and data objects. A data object is characterized by its states and state transitions represented as object life cycle. For process execution, all behavioral execution constraints must be correct. Correctness can be verified via soundness checking which currently only considers control flow information. For data correctness, conformance between a process model and its object life cycles is checked. Current approaches abstract from dependencies between multiple data objects and require fully specified process models although, in real-world process repositories, often underspecified models are found. Coping with these issues, we introduce the concept of synchronized object life cycles and we define a mapping of data constraints of a process model to Petri nets extending an existing mapping. Further, we apply the notion of weak conformance to process models to tell whether each time an activity needs to access a data object in a particular state, it is guaranteed that the data object is in or can reach the expected state. Then, we introduce an algorithm for an integrated verification of control flow correctness and weak data conformance using soundness checking.
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.
Ubiquitous business processes are the new generation of processes that pervade the physical space and interact with their environments using a minimum of human involvement. Although they are now widely deployed in the industry, their deployment is still ad hoc . They are implemented after an arbitrary modeling phase or no modeling phase at all. The absence of a solid modeling phase backing up the implementation generates many loopholes that are stressed in the literature. Here, we tackle the issue of modeling ubiquitous business processes. We propose patterns to represent the recent ubiquitous computing features. These patterns are the outcome of an analysis we conducted in the field of human-computer interaction to examine how the features are actually deployed. The patterns' understandability, ease-of-use, usefulness, and completeness are examined via a user experiment. The results indicate that these four indexes are on the positive track. Hence, the patterns may be the backbone of ubiquitous business process modeling in industrial applications.
Contents: Artem Polyvanny, Sergey Smirnow, and Mathias Weske The Triconnected Abstraction of Process Models 1 Introduction 2 Business Process Model Abstraction 3 Preliminaries 4 Triconnected Decomposition 4.1 Basic Approach for Process Component Discovery 4.2 SPQR-Tree Decomposition 4.3 SPQR-Tree Fragments in the Context of Process Models 5 Triconnected Abstraction 5.1 Abstraction Rules 5.2 Abstraction Algorithm 6 Related Work and Conclusions
Business process models are abstractions of concrete operational procedures that occur in the daily business of organizations. To cope with the complexity of these models, business process model abstraction has been introduced recently. Its goal is to derive from a detailed process model several abstract models that provide a high-level understanding of the process. While techniques for constructing abstract models are reported in the literature, little is known about the relationships between process instances and abstract models. In this paper we show how the state of an abstract activity can be calculated from the states of related, detailed process activities as they happen. The approach uses activity state propagation. With state uniqueness and state transition correctness we introduce formal properties that improve the understanding of state propagation. Algorithms to check these properties are devised. Finally, we use behavioral profiles to identify and classify behavioral inconsistencies in abstract process models that might occur, once activity state propagation is used.
Enterprises reach out for collaborations with other organizations in order to offer complex products and services to the market. Such collaboration and coordination between different organizations, for a good share, is facilitated by information technology. The BPMN process choreography is a modeling language for specifying the exchange of information and services between different organizations at the business level. Recently, there is a surging use of the REST architectural style for the provisioning of services on the web, but few systematic engineering approach to design their collaboration. In this paper, we address this gap in a comprehensive way by defining a semi-automatic method for the derivation of RESTful choreographies from process choreographies. The method is based on natural language analysis techniques to derive interactions from the textual information in process choreographies. The proposed method is evaluated in terms of effectiveness resulting in the intervention of a web engineer in only about 10% of all generated RESTful interactions.
In the field of Business Process Management (BPM), modeling business processes and related data is a critical issue since process activities need to manage data stored in databases. The connection between processes and data is usually handled at the implementation level, even if modeling both processes and data at the conceptual level should help designers in improving business process models and identifying requirements for implementation. Especially in data -and decision-intensive contexts, business process activities need to access data stored both in databases and data warehouses. In this paper, we complete our approach for defining a novel conceptual view that bridges process activities and data. The proposed approach allows the designer to model the connection between business processes and database models and define the operations to perform, providing interesting insights on the overall connected perspective and hints for identifying activities that are crucial for decision support.
Companies strive to improve their business processes in order to remain competitive. Process mining aims to infer meaningful insights from process-related data and attracted the attention of practitioners, tool-vendors, and researchers in recent years. Traditionally, event logs are assumed to describe the as-is situation. But this is not necessarily the case in environments where logging may be compromised due to manual logging. For example, hospital staff may need to manually enter information regarding the patient’s treatment. As a result, events or timestamps may be missing or incorrect. In this paper, we make use of process knowledge captured in process models, and provide a method to repair missing events in the logs. This way, we facilitate analysis of incomplete logs. We realize the repair by combining stochastic Petri nets, alignments, and Bayesian networks. We evaluate the results using both synthetic data and real event data from a Dutch hospital.
Business processes are vital to managing organizations as they sustain a company's competitiveness. Consequently, these organizations maintain collections of hundreds or thousands of process models for streamlining working procedures and facilitating process implementation. Yet, the management of large process model collections requires effective searching capabilities. Recent research focused on similarity search of process models, but querying process models is still a largely open topic. This article presents an approach to querying process models that takes a process example as input and discovers all models that allow replaying the behavior of the query. To this end, we provide a notion of behavioral inclusion that is based on trace semantics and abstraction. Additional to deciding a match, a closeness score is provided that describes how well the behavior of the query is represented in the model and can be used for ranking. The article introduces the formal foundations of the approach and shows how they are applied to querying large process model collections. An experimental evaluation has been conducted that confirms the suitability of the solution as well as its applicability and scalability in practice.
There is a wide variety of drivers for business process modelling initiatives, reaching from organisational redesign to the development of information systems. Consequently, a common business process is often captured in multiple models that overlap in content due to serving different purposes. Business process management aims at flexible adaptation to changing business needs. Hence, changes of business processes occur frequently and have to be incorporated in the respective process models. Once a process model is changed, related process models have to be updated accordingly, despite the fact that those process models may only be loosely coupled. In this article, we introduce an approach that supports change propagation between related process models. Given a change in one process model, we leverage the behavioural abstraction of behavioural profiles for corresponding activities in order to determine a change region in another model. Our approach is able to cope with changes in pairs of models that are not related by hierarchical refinement and show behavioural inconsistencies. We evaluate the applicability of our approach with two real-world process model collections. To this end, we either deduce change operations from different model revisions or rely on synthetic change operations.
The engineering of digital twins and their user interaction parts with explicated processes, namely processaware digital twin cockpits (PADTCs), is challenging due to the complexity of the systems and the need for information from different disciplines within the engineering process. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate how to facilitate their engineering by using already existing data, namely event logs, and reducing the number of manual steps for their engineering. Current research lacks systematic, automated approaches to derive process-aware digital twin cockpits even though some helpful techniques already exist in the areas of process mining and software engineering. Within this paper, we present a low-code development approach that reduces the amount of hand-written code needed and uses process mining techniques to derive PADTCs. We describe what models could be derived from event log data, which generative steps are needed for the engineering of PADTCs, and how process mining could be incorporated into the resulting application. This process is evaluated using the MIMIC III dataset for the creation of a PADTC prototype for an automated hospital transportation system. This approach can be used for early prototyping of PADTCs as it needs no hand-written code in the first place, but it still allows for the iterative evolvement of the application. This empowers domain experts to create their PADTC prototypes.
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.
Proceedings of the HPI Research School on Service-oriented Systems Engineering 2020 Fall Retreat
(2021)
Design and Implementation of service-oriented architectures imposes a huge number of research questions from the fields of software engineering, system analysis and modeling, adaptability, and application integration. Component orientation and web services are two approaches for design and realization of complex web-based system. Both approaches allow for dynamic application adaptation as well as integration of enterprise application.
Service-Oriented Systems Engineering represents a symbiosis of best practices in object-orientation, component-based development, distributed computing, and business process management. It provides integration of business and IT concerns.
The annual Ph.D. Retreat of the Research School provides each member the opportunity to present his/her current state of their research and to give an outline of a prospective Ph.D. thesis. Due to the interdisciplinary structure of the research school, this technical report covers a wide range of topics. These include but are not limited to: Human Computer Interaction and Computer Vision as Service; Service-oriented Geovisualization Systems; Algorithm Engineering for Service-oriented Systems; Modeling and Verification of Self-adaptive Service-oriented Systems; Tools and Methods for Software Engineering in Service-oriented Systems; Security Engineering of Service-based IT Systems; Service-oriented Information Systems; Evolutionary Transition of Enterprise Applications to Service Orientation; Operating System Abstractions for Service-oriented Computing; and Services Specification, Composition, and Enactment.
Design and Implementation of service-oriented architectures imposes a huge number of research questions from the fields of software engineering, system analysis and modeling, adaptability, and application integration. Component orientation and web services are two approaches for design and realization of complex web-based system. Both approaches allow for dynamic application adaptation as well as integration of enterprise application. Commonly used technologies, such as J2EE and .NET, form de facto standards for the realization of complex distributed systems. Evolution of component systems has lead to web services and service-based architectures. This has been manifested in a multitude of industry standards and initiatives such as XML, WSDL UDDI, SOAP, etc. All these achievements lead to a new and promising paradigm in IT systems engineering which proposes to design complex software solutions as collaboration of contractually defined software services. Service-Oriented Systems Engineering represents a symbiosis of best practices in object-orientation, component-based development, distributed computing, and business process management. It provides integration of business and IT concerns. The annual Ph.D. Retreat of the Research School provides each member the opportunity to present his/her current state of their research and to give an outline of a prospective Ph.D. thesis. Due to the interdisciplinary structure of the Research Scholl, this technical report covers a wide range of research topics. These include but are not limited to: Self-Adaptive Service-Oriented Systems, Operating System Support for Service-Oriented Systems, Architecture and Modeling of Service-Oriented Systems, Adaptive Process Management, Services Composition and Workflow Planning, Security Engineering of Service-Based IT Systems, Quantitative Analysis and Optimization of Service-Oriented Systems, Service-Oriented Systems in 3D Computer Graphics sowie Service-Oriented Geoinformatics.
Preface to BPM 2014
(2016)