What we know and what we do not know about DMN

The recent Decision Model and Notation (DMN) establishes business decisions as first-class citizens of executable business processes. This research note has two objectives: first, to describe DMN's technical and theoretical foundations; second, to identify research directions for investigating DMN's potential benefits on a technological, individual and organizational level. To this end, we integrate perspectives from management science, cognitive theory and information systems research

Customizing BPMN Diagrams Using Timelines

BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) is widely used standard modeling technique for representing Business Processes by using diagrams, but lacks in some aspects. Representing execution-dependent and time-dependent decisions in BPMN Diagrams may be a daunting challenge [Carlo Combi et al., 2017]. In many cases such constraints are omitted in order to preserve the simplicity and the readability of the process model. However, for purposes such as compliance checking, process mining, and verification, formalizing such constraints could be very useful. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for annotating BPMN Diagrams with Temporal Synchronization Rules borrowed from the timeline-based planning field. We discuss the expressivity of the proposed approach and show that it is able to capture a lot of complex temporally-related constraints without affecting the structure of BPMN diagrams. Finally, we provide a mapping from annotated BPMN diagrams to timeline-based planning problems that allows one to take advantage of the last twenty years of theoretical and practical developments in the field

DETECTING ROLE INCONSISTENCIES IN PROCESS MODELS

Business process models capture crucial information about business operations. To overcome the challenge of maintaining process definitions in large process repositories, researchers have suggested methods to discover errors in the functional and the behavioral perspectives of process models. However, there is a gap in the literature on the detection of problems on the organizational perspective of process models, which is critical to manage the resources and the responsibilities within organizations. In this paper, we introduce an approach to automatically detect inconsistencies between activities and roles in process models. Our approach implements natural language processing techniques and enterprise semantics to identify ambiguous, redundant, and missing roles in textual descriptions. We applied our approach on the process model repository of a major telecommunication company. A quantitative evaluation of our approach with 282 real-life activities displayed that this approach can accurately discover role inconsistencies. Practitioners can achieve significant quality improvements in their process model repositories by applying the approach on process models complemented with textual descriptions

A recursive paradigm for aligning observed behavior of large structured process models

The alignment of observed and modeled behavior is a crucial problem in process mining, since it opens the door for conformance checking and enhancement of process models. The state of the art techniques for the computation of alignments rely on a full exploration of the combination of the model state space and the observed behavior (an event log), which hampers their applicability for large instances. This paper presents a fresh view to the alignment problem: the computation of alignments is casted as the resolution of Integer Linear Programming models, where the user can decide the granularity of the alignment steps. Moreover, a novel recursive strategy is used to split the problem into small pieces, exponentially reducing the complexity of the ILP models to be solved. The contributions of this paper represent a promising alternative to fight the inherent complexity of computing alignments for large instances.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Tendências do BPM

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia e Gestão de Sistemas de InformaçãoAtualmente, as organizações encontram-se inseridas em ambientes de mercado cada vez mais competitivos, deparando-se com várias dificuldades, em que face a estas, necessitam de encontrar soluções. Por essa razão, viram o BPM como uma solução para melhorar o seu negócio. Um dos objetivos do BPM é ter a capacidade de identificar, monitorar e otimizar processos de negócio cujo resultado final é um conjunto de atividades realizadas. Com base nesta monitorização e otimização, as organizações tornam-se capazes de identificar possíveis lacunas nos seus processos e com isto melhorá-los. Com isto, verificou-se a falta de informação existente cientificamente em relação à identificação de novas tendências para o BPM. Neste sentido, com este trabalho propomos realizar uma investigação seguindo a metodologia de pesquisa em Design Science Research, em que iniciamos uma pesquisa de levantamento de tendência seguindo a abordagem proposta por Webster e Watson (2002), com base em duas conferências internacionais em BPM de ranking elevado, em que se identificou os tópicos mais abordados como também problemas e soluções desde 2013 até 2015. Posteriormente, com informação recolhida ao longo de três anos, através da criação de um framework identificamos algumas tendências para o BPM, de forma a melhorá-lo. Para garantir a credibilidade dos resultados, através da criação de um inquérito por questionário realizou-se a avaliação dos resultados obtidos.Nowadays, the market gets more and more competitive, thus companies need to learn how to manage and find the right solutions for their business when facing challenges. For that reason, they saw BPM as a great tool to expand their business. One of the features of BPM is the capacity to identify, monetize and optimize processes within the business which ultimately allow for an aggregation of performed activities. Thanks to these features, the business have been capable of identifying possible gaps in their processes and how to improve them. With this, it was verified the lack of scientific information regarding the identification of new trends for BPM. Therefore, with this work we propose to conduct an investigation that follows the searching methodology in Design Science Research, where we initiate a search of lifting trends as proposed by Webster and Watson (2002). This is based on two international conferences on BPM, in which it identified the most discussed topics and also the problems and solutions since 2013 until 2015. After this investigation, with collected information over 3 years, through the creation of framework we identify some BPM trends. To approve this results, we created a survey that was held an evaluation of the final results

A Systematic Mapping Study on Requirements Engineering in Software Ecosystems

Software ecosystems (SECOs) and open innovation processes have been claimed as a way forward for the software industry. A proper understanding of requirements is as important for these IT-systems as for more traditional ones. This paper presents a mapping study on the issues of requirements engineering and quality aspects in SECOs and analyzes emerging ideas. Our findings indicate that among the various phases or subtasks of requirements engineering, most of the SECO specific research has been accomplished on elicitation, analysis, and modeling. On the other hand, requirements selection, prioritization, verification, and traceability has attracted few published studies. Among the various quality attributes, most of the SECOs research has been performed on security, performance and testability. On the other hand, reliability, safety, maintainability, transparency, usability attracted few published studies. The paper provides a review of the academic literature about SECO-related requirements engineering activities, modeling approaches, and quality attributes, positions the source publications in a taxonomy of issues and identifies gaps where there has been little research.Comment: Journal of Information Technology Research (JITR) 11(1

Towards Automated Attack Simulations of BPMN-based Processes

Process digitization and integration is an increasing need for enterprises, while cyber-attacks denote a growing threat. Using the Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) is common to handle the digital and integration focus within and across organizations. In other parts of the same companies, threat modeling and attack graphs are used for analyzing the security posture and resilience. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to use attack graph simulations on processes represented in BPMN. Our contributions are the identification of BPMN's attack surface, a mapping of BPMN elements to concepts in a Meta Attack Language (MAL)-based Domain-Specific Language (DSL), called coreLang, and a prototype to demonstrate our approach in a case study using a real-world invoice integration process. The study shows that non-invasively enriching BPMN instances with cybersecurity analysis through attack graphs is possible without much human expert input. The resulting insights into potential vulnerabilities could be beneficial for the process modelers.Comment: Submitted for review to EDOC 202

Process Matching: Performance Trade-Off Between Summary and Full-Length Descriptions

Business process models are used by modeling experts to concisely depict the workflow of an organization that plays a pivotal role in the development of ERP systems. A growing number of organizations also maintain the textual process descriptions of these process models as the descriptions are understandable across the board. A recent study has revealed that these textual descriptions can also be used for an accurate process model search. However, the use of textual descriptions is a resource-intensive task due to the sheer size of the descriptions. To that end, in this paper, we have proposed an approach that relies on the use of summary textual descriptions, instead of full-length descriptions, to enhance the performance of process matching. To evaluate the proposed approach, we have used four diverse text summarization techniques, including a state-of-the-art deep learning based technique, for generating summary descriptions, and seven text-matching techniques for finding relevant process specifications. Our empirical study has established that the Vector Space Model is the most effective technique for process matching. Furthermore, the use of Lingo generated summaries, at a compression rate of 50 %, can achieve a higher efficiency as well as effectiveness than the full-length textual process descriptions