PLACES'10: The 3rd Workshop on Programmng Language Approaches to concurrency and Communication-Centric Software

Paphos, Cyprus. March 201

Flexible Data Acquisition in Object-aware Process Management

Abstract. Data-centric approaches to business process management, in general, no longer require specific activities to be executed in a certain order, but instead data values must be present in business objects for a successful completion. While this holds the promise of more flexible processes, the addition of the data perspective results in increased complexity. Therefore, data-centric approaches must be able to cope with the increased complexity, while still fulfilling the promise of more flexible processes. Object-aware process management specifies business processes in terms of objects as well as their lifecycle processes. Lifecycle processes determine how an object acquires all necessary data values. As data values are not always available in the order the lifecycle process of an object requires, the lifecycle process must be able to flexibly handle these deviations. Object-aware process management provides operational semantics with flexible data acquisition built into it, instead of tasking the process modeler with pre-specifying a flexible process. At the technical level, the flexible data acquisition is accomplished with process rules

An Approach for Modeling and Coordinating Process Interactions

In any enterprise, different entities collaborate to achieve common business objectives. The processes used to reach these objectives have relations and, therefore, depend on each other. Their proper coordination within a process-aware information system requires coping with heterogeneous granularity of processes, unclear process relations, and increased process model complexity due to the integration of coordination constraints into process models. This paper presents the concept of coordination processes, which constitute a means to handle the interactions between a multitude of interdependent processes running asynchronously to each other. Particularly, coordination processes leverage the clear identification of process relations, a defined granularity for processes, and the abstraction from details of the individual processes in order to provide a robust framework, enabling proper coordination support for interdependent processes

Executing Lifecycle Processes in Object-Aware Process Management

Data-centric approaches to business process management, in general, no longer require specific activities to be executed in a certain order, but instead data values must be present in business objects for a successful process completion. While this holds the promise of more flexible processes, the addition of the data perspective results in increased complexity. Therefore, data-centric approaches must be able to cope with the increased complexity, while still fulfilling the promise of high process flexibility. Object-aware process management specifies business processes in terms of objects as well as their lifecycle processes. Lifecycle processes determine how an object acquires all necessary data values. As data values are not always available in the order the lifecycle process of an object requires, the lifecycle process must be able to flexibly handle these deviations. Object-aware process management provides operational semantics with built-in flexible data acquisition, instead of tasking the process modeler with pre-specifying all execution variants. At the technical level, the flexible data acquisition is accomplished with process rules, which efficiently realize the operational semantics

Data-Flow Modeling: A Survey of Issues and Approaches

This paper presents a survey of previous research on modeling the data flow perspective of business processes. When it comes to modeling and analyzing business process models the current research focuses on control flow modeling (i.e. the activities of the process) and very little attention is paid to the data-flow perspective. But data is essential in a process. In order to execute a workflow, the tasks need data. Without data or without data available on time, the control flow cannot be executed. For some time, various researchers tried to investigate the data flow perspective of process models or to combine the control and data flow in one model. This paper surveys those approaches. We conclude that there is no model showing a clear data flow perspective focusing on how data changes during a process execution. The literature offers some similar approaches ranging from data modeling using elements from relational database domain, going through process model verification and ending with elements related to Web Services

IT supported business process negotiation, reconciliation and execution for cross-organisational e-business collaboration

In modern enterprises, workflow technology is commonly used for business process automation. Established business processes represent successful business practice and become a crucial part of corporate assets. In the Internet era, electronic business is chosen by more and more organisations as a preferred way of conducting business practice. In response to the increasing demands for cross-organisational business automation, especially those raised by the B2B electronic commerce community, the concept of collaboration between automated business processes, i.e. workflow collaboration, is emerging. Otherwise, automation would be confined within individual organisations and cross-organisational collaboration would still have to be carried out manually. However, much of the previous research work overlooks the acquisition of the compatible workflows at build time and simply assumes that compatibility is achieved through face-toface negotiation followed by a design from scratch approach that creates collaborative workflows based on the agreement resulted from the negotiation. The resource-intensive and error-prone approach can hardly keep up with the pace of today’s marketplace with increasing transaction volume and complexity. This thesis identifies the requirements for cross-organisational workflow collaboration (COWCO) through an integrated approach, proposes a comprehensive supporting framework, explains the key enabling techniques of the framework, and implements and evaluates them in the form of a prototype system – COWCO-Guru. With the support of such a framework, cross-organisational workflow collaboration can be managed and conducted with reduced human effort, which will further facilitate cross-organisational e-business, especially B2B e-commerce practices