Extend Commitment Protocols with Temporal Regulations: Why and How

The proposal of Elisa Marengo's thesis is to extend commitment protocols to explicitly account for temporal regulations. This extension will satisfy two needs: (1) it will allow representing, in a flexible and modular way, temporal regulations with a normative force, posed on the interaction, so as to represent conventions, laws and suchlike; (2) it will allow committing to complex conditions, which describe not only what will be achieved but to some extent also how. These two aspects will be deeply investigated in the proposal of a unified framework, which is part of the ongoing work and will be included in the thesis.Comment: Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium and Poster Session of the 5th International Symposium on Rules (RuleML 2011@IJCAI), pages 1-8 (arXiv:1107.1686

Predictive Monitoring of Business Processes

Modern information systems that support complex business processes generally maintain significant amounts of process execution data, particularly records of events corresponding to the execution of activities (event logs). In this paper, we present an approach to analyze such event logs in order to predictively monitor business goals during business process execution. At any point during an execution of a process, the user can define business goals in the form of linear temporal logic rules. When an activity is being executed, the framework identifies input data values that are more (or less) likely to lead to the achievement of each business goal. Unlike reactive compliance monitoring approaches that detect violations only after they have occurred, our predictive monitoring approach provides early advice so that users can steer ongoing process executions towards the achievement of business goals. In other words, violations are predicted (and potentially prevented) rather than merely detected. The approach has been implemented in the ProM process mining toolset and validated on a real-life log pertaining to the treatment of cancer patients in a large hospital

Towards Business Process Management in Networked Ecosystems

Managing and supporting the collaboration between different actors is key in any organizational context, whether of a hierarchical or a networked nature. In the networked context of ecosystems of service providers and other stakeholders, BPM is faced with different challenges than in a conventional hierarchical model, based on up front consolidation and consensus on the process flows used in collaboration. In networked ecosystems of potential business partners, designing collaboration upfront is not feasible. Coalitions are formed situationally, and sometimes even ad-hoc. This paper presents a number of challenges for conventional BPM in such environments, and explores how declarative process management technology could address them, indicating topics for further research

LTLf and LDLf Monitoring: A Technical Report

Runtime monitoring is one of the central tasks to provide operational decision support to running business processes, and check on-the-fly whether they comply with constraints and rules. We study runtime monitoring of properties expressed in LTL on finite traces (LTLf) and in its extension LDLf. LDLf is a powerful logic that captures all monadic second order logic on finite traces, which is obtained by combining regular expressions and LTLf, adopting the syntax of propositional dynamic logic (PDL). Interestingly, in spite of its greater expressivity, LDLf has exactly the same computational complexity of LTLf. We show that LDLf is able to capture, in the logic itself, not only the constraints to be monitored, but also the de-facto standard RV-LTL monitors. This makes it possible to declaratively capture monitoring metaconstraints, and check them by relying on usual logical services instead of ad-hoc algorithms. This, in turn, enables to flexibly monitor constraints depending on the monitoring state of other constraints, e.g., "compensation" constraints that are only checked when others are detected to be violated. In addition, we devise a direct translation of LDLf formulas into nondeterministic automata, avoiding to detour to Buechi automata or alternating automata, and we use it to implement a monitoring plug-in for the PROM suite

Towards a Unified Framework for Declarative Structured Communications

We present a unified framework for the declarative analysis of structured communications. By relying on a (timed) concurrent constraint programming language, we show that in addition to the usual operational techniques from process calculi, the analysis of structured communications can elegantly exploit logic-based reasoning techniques. We introduce a declarative interpretation of the language for structured communications proposed by Honda, Vasconcelos, and Kubo. Distinguishing features of our approach are: the possibility of including partial information (constraints) in the session model; the use of explicit time for reasoning about session duration and expiration; a tight correspondence with logic, which formally relates session execution and linear-time temporal logic formulas