Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Enterprise Systems Analysis and Modelling

In ES implementations, process modelling is a critical and often overlooked activity. This paper proposes a framework for process modelling of ES. The four steps method involves: Current Situation Analysis, Business Process Improvements and Requirements, Gap Analysis, and To-be process to develop. Outputs of the methodology are an interdependent set of organizational and system proposed changes, and feedback loops to the ES vendors and to the strategy of the firm. In-depth case studies and extensive literature review provides methodological support. For practitioners, this study provides useful insights into one of the reasons by which companies could be frustrated with ES implementation.E-business, ERP

Interactive situation modelling in knowledge intensive domains

Interactive Situation Modelling (ISM) method, a semi-methodological approach, is proposed to tackle issues associated with modelling complex knowledge intensive domains, which cannot be easily modelled using traditional approaches. This paper presents the background and implementation of ISM within a complex domain, where synthesizing knowledge from various sources is critical, and is based on the principles of ethnography within a constructivist framework. Although the motivation for the reported work comes from the application presented in the paper, the actual scope of the paper covers a wide range of issues related to modelling complex systems. The author firstly reviews approaches used for modelling knowledge intensive domains, preceded by a brief discussion about two main issues: symmetry of ignorance and system behaviour, which are often confronted when applying modelling approaches to business domains. The ISM process is then characterized and critiqued with lessons from an exemplar presented to illustrate its effectiveness

Interactive situation modelling in knowledge intensive domains

Interactive Situation Modelling (ISM) method, a semi-methodological approach, is proposed to tackle issues associated with modelling complex knowledge intensive domains, which cannot be easily modelled using traditional approaches. This paper presents the background and implementation of ISM within a complex domain, where synthesizing knowledge from various sources is critical, and is based on the principles of ethnography within a constructivist framework. Although the motivation for the reported work comes from the application presented in the paper, the actual scope of the paper covers a wide range of issues related to modelling complex systems. The author firstly reviews approaches used for modelling knowledge intensive domains, preceded by a brief discussion about two main issues: symmetry of ignorance and system behaviour, which are often confronted when applying modelling approaches to business domains. The ISM process is then characterized and critiqued with lessons from an exemplar presented to illustrate its effectiveness.

VR-PMS: a new approach for performance measurement and management of industrial systems

A new performance measurement and management framework based on value and risk is proposed. The proposed framework is applied to the modelling and evaluation of the a priori performance evaluation of manufacturing processes and to deciding on their alternatives. For this reason, it consistently integrates concepts relevant to objectives, activity, and risk in a single framework comprising a conceptual value/risk model, and it conceptualises the idea of value- and risk based performance management in a process context. In addition, a methodological framework is developed to provide guidelines for the decision-makers or performance evaluators of the processes. To facilitate the performance measurement and management process, this latter framework is organized in four phases: context establishment, performance modelling, performance assessment, and decision-making. Each phase of the framework is then instrumented with state of-the-art quantitative analysis tools and methods. For process design and evaluation, the deliverable of the value- and risk-based performance measurement and management system (VR-PMS) is a set of ranked solutions (i.e. alternative business processes) evaluated against the developed value and risk indicators. The proposed VR-PMS is illustrated with a case study from discrete parts manufacturing but is indeed applicable to a wide range of processes or systems

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.In modern organisations business process modelling has become fundamental due to the increasing rate of organisational change. As a consequence, an organisation needs to continuously redesign its business processes on a regular basis. One major problem associated with the way business process modelling (BPM) is carried out today is the lack of explicit and systematic reuse of previously developed models. Enabling the reuse of previously modelled behaviour can have a beneficial impact on the quality and efficiency of the overall information systems development process and also improve the effectiveness of an organisation’s business processes. In related disciplines, like software engineering, patterns have emerged as a widely accepted architectural mechanism for reusing solutions. In business process modelling the use of patterns is quite limited apart from few sporadic attempts proposed by the literature. Thus, pattern-based BPM is not commonplace. Business process patterns should ideally be discovered from the empirical analysis of organisational processes. Empiricism is currently not the basis for the discovery of patterns for business process modelling and no systematic methodology for collecting and analysing process models of business organisations currently exists. The purpose of the presented research project is to develop a methodological framework for achieving reuse in BPM via the discovery and adoption of patterns. The framework is called Semantic Discovery and Reuse of Business Process Patterns (SDR). SDR provides a systematic method for identifying patterns among organisational data assets representing business behaviour. The framework adopts ontologies (i.e., formalised conceptual models of real-world domains) in order to facilitate such discovery. The research has also produced an ontology of business processes that provides the underlying semantic definitions of processes and their constituent parts. The use of ontologies to model business processes represents a novel approach and combines advances achieved by the Semantic Web and BPM communities. The methodological framework also relates to a new line of research in BPM on declarative business processes in which the models specify what should be done rather than how to ‘prescriptively’ do it. The research follows a design science method for designing and evaluating SDR. Evaluation is carried out using real world sources and reuse scenarios taken from both the financial and educational domains

Creative firms as change agents in creative spaces

This paper focuses attention on a quantitative analysis of the creative sector. After a selective and concise literature review, it discusses three important methodological advances, viz. a spatial-econometric approach, a non-parametric business performance analysis based on Data Envelopment Analysis, and finally, a comprehensive and integrated modelling framework in which a so-called ‘Flying Disc’ model is used as a tool for specifying and estimating a Structural Equations Model. The paper offers finally some concluding remarks

GoBIS: An integrated framework to analyse the goal and business process perspectives in information systems

[EN] Context Organisational reengineering, continuous process improvement, alignment among complementary analysis perspectives, and information traceability are some current motivations to promote investment and scientific effort for integrating goal and business process perspectives. Providing support to integrate information systems analysis becomes a challenge in this complex setting. Objective The GoBIS framework integrates two goal and business process modelling approaches: i⁎ (a goal-oriented modelling method) and Communication Analysis (a communication-oriented business process modelling method). Method In this paper, we describe the methodological integration of both methods with the aim of fulfilling several criteria: i) to rely on appropriate theories; ii) to provide abstract and concrete syntaxes; iii) to provide scenarios of application; iv) to develop tool support; v) to provide demonstrable benefits to potential adopters. Results We provide guidelines for using the two modelling methods in a top-down analysis scenario. The guidelines are validated by means of a comparative experiment and a focus-group session with students. Conclusions From a practitioner viewpoint (modeller and/or analyst), the guidelines facilitate the traceability between goal and business process models, the experimental results highlight the benefits of GoBIS in performance and usability perceptions, and demonstrate an improvement on the completeness of the latter having an impact on efficiency. From a researcher perspective, the validation has produced useful feedback for future research.This work has been supported by the Spanish MICINN Project ProS-Req (TIN2010-19130-C02-01, TIN2010-19130-C02-02) and EOSSAC (TIN2013-44641-P); the Generalitat Valenciana Project IDEO (PROMETEOII/2014/039); the FPI-UPV Pre-Doctoral Grant; the European Commission Project CaaS (FP7 611351); and the ERDF Structural Funds.Ruiz Carmona, LM.; Costal, D.; España Cubillo, S.; Franch, X.; Pastor López, O. (2015). GoBIS: An integrated framework to analyse the goal and business process perspectives in information systems. Information Systems. 53:330-345. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2015.03.007S3303455

A Process Modelling Framework Based on Point Interval Temporal Logic with an Application to Modelling Patient Flows

This thesis considers an application of a temporal theory to describe and model the patient journey in the hospital accident and emergency (A&E) department. The aim is to introduce a generic but dynamic method applied to any setting, including healthcare. Constructing a consistent process model can be instrumental in streamlining healthcare issues. Current process modelling techniques used in healthcare such as flowcharts, unified modelling language activity diagram (UML AD), and business process modelling notation (BPMN) are intuitive and imprecise. They cannot fully capture the complexities of the types of activities and the full extent of temporal constraints to an extent where one could reason about the flows. Formal approaches such as Petri have also been reviewed to investigate their applicability to the healthcare domain to model processes. Additionally, to schedule patient flows, current modelling standards do not offer any formal mechanism, so healthcare relies on critical path method (CPM) and program evaluation review technique (PERT), that also have limitations, i.e. finish-start barrier. It is imperative to specify the temporal constraints between the start and/or end of a process, e.g., the beginning of a process A precedes the start (or end) of a process B. However, these approaches failed to provide us with a mechanism for handling these temporal situations. If provided, a formal representation can assist in effective knowledge representation and quality enhancement concerning a process. Also, it would help in uncovering complexities of a system and assist in modelling it in a consistent way which is not possible with the existing modelling techniques. The above issues are addressed in this thesis by proposing a framework that would provide a knowledge base to model patient flows for accurate representation based on point interval temporal logic (PITL) that treats point and interval as primitives. These objects would constitute the knowledge base for the formal description of a system. With the aid of the inference mechanism of the temporal theory presented here, exhaustive temporal constraints derived from the proposed axiomatic system’ components serves as a knowledge base. The proposed methodological framework would adopt a model-theoretic approach in which a theory is developed and considered as a model while the corresponding instance is considered as its application. Using this approach would assist in identifying core components of the system and their precise operation representing a real-life domain deemed suitable to the process modelling issues specified in this thesis. Thus, I have evaluated the modelling standards for their most-used terminologies and constructs to identify their key components. It will also assist in the generalisation of the critical terms (of process modelling standards) based on their ontology. A set of generalised terms proposed would serve as an enumeration of the theory and subsume the core modelling elements of the process modelling standards. The catalogue presents a knowledge base for the business and healthcare domains, and its components are formally defined (semantics). Furthermore, a resolution theorem-proof is used to show the structural features of the theory (model) to establish it is sound and complete. After establishing that the theory is sound and complete, the next step is to provide the instantiation of the theory. This is achieved by mapping the core components of the theory to their corresponding instances. Additionally, a formal graphical tool termed as point graph (PG) is used to visualise the cases of the proposed axiomatic system. PG facilitates in modelling, and scheduling patient flows and enables analysing existing models for possible inaccuracies and inconsistencies supported by a reasoning mechanism based on PITL. Following that, a transformation is developed to map the core modelling components of the standards into the extended PG (PG*) based on the semantics presented by the axiomatic system. A real-life case (from the King’s College hospital accident and emergency (A&E) department’s trauma patient pathway) is considered to validate the framework. It is divided into three patient flows to depict the journey of a patient with significant trauma, arriving at A&E, undergoing a procedure and subsequently discharged. Their staff relied upon the UML-AD and BPMN to model the patient flows. An evaluation of their representation is presented to show the shortfalls of the modelling standards to model patient flows. The last step is to model these patient flows using the developed approach, which is supported by enhanced reasoning and scheduling

Simulation in manufacturing and business: A review

Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.This paper reports the results of a review of simulation applications published within peer-reviewed literature between 1997 and 2006 to provide an up-to-date picture of the role of simulation techniques within manufacturing and business. The review is characterised by three factors: wide coverage, broad scope of the simulation techniques, and a focus on real-world applications. A structured methodology was followed to narrow down the search from around 20,000 papers to 281. Results include interesting trends and patterns. For instance, although discrete event simulation is the most popular technique, it has lower stakeholder engagement than other techniques, such as system dynamics or gaming. This is highly correlated with modelling lead time and purpose. Considering application areas, modelling is mostly used in scheduling. Finally, this review shows an increasing interest in hybrid modelling as an approach to cope with complex enterprise-wide systems