Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Distributed collaborative context-aware content-centric workflow management for mobile devices

Ubiquitous mobile devices have become a necessity in today’s society, opening new opportunities for interaction and collaboration between geographically distributed people. With the increased use of mobile phones, people can collaborate while on the move. Collaborators expect technologies that would enhance their teamwork and respond to their individual needs. Workflow is a widely used technology that supports collaboration and can be adapted for a variety of collaborative scenarios. Although the originally computer-based workflow technology has expanded also on mobile devices, there are still research challenges in the development of user-focused device-oriented collaborative workflows. As opposed to desktop computers, mobile devices provide a different, more personalised user experience and are carried by their owners everywhere. Mobile devices can capture user context and behave as digitalised user complements. By integrating context awareness into the workflow technology, workflow decisions can be based on local, context information and therefore, be more adapted to individual collaborators’ circumstances and expectations. Knowing the current context of collaborators and their mobile devices is useful, especially in mobile peer-topeer collaboration where the workflow process execution can be driven by devices according to the situation. In mobile collaboration, team workers share pictures, videos, or other content. Monitoring and exchanging the information on the current state of the content processed on devices can enhance the overall workflow execution. As mobile devices in peer-to-peer collaboration are not aware of a global workflow state, the content state information can be used to communicate progress among collaborators. However, there is still a lack of integrating content lifecycles in process-oriented workflows. The aim of this research was therefore to investigate how workflow technology can be adapted for mobile peer-to-peer collaboration, in particular, how the level of context awareness in mobile collaborative workflows can be increased and how the extra content lifecycle management support can be integrated. The collaborative workflow technology has been adapted for mobile peerto- peer collaboration by integrating context and content awareness. In the first place, a workflow-specific context management approach has been developed that allows defining workflow-specific context models and supports the integration of context models with collaborative workflows. Workflow process has been adapted to make decisions based on context information. Secondly, extra content management support has been added to the workflow technology. A representation for content lifecycles has been designed, and content lifecycles have been integrated with the workflow process. In this thesis, the MobWEL workflow approach is introduced. The Mob- WEL workflow approach allows defining, managing and executing mobile context-aware content-centric workflows. MobWEL is a workflow execution language that extends BPEL, using constructs from existing workflow approaches, Context4BPEL and BPELlight, and adopting elements from the BALSA workflow model. The MobWEL workflow management approach is a technology-based solution that has been designed to provide workflow management support to a specific class of mobile applications

Applications of Blockchain in Business Processes: A Comprehensive Review

Blockchain (BC), as an emerging technology, is revolutionizing Business Process Management (BPM) in multiple ways. The main adoption is to serve as a trusted infrastructure to guarantee the trust of collaborations among multiple partners in trustless environments. Especially, BC enables trust of information by using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). With the power of smart contracts, BC enforces the obligations of counterparties that transact in a business process (BP) by programming the contracts as transactions. This paper aims to study the state-of-the-art of BC technologies by (1) exploring its applications in BPM with the focus on how BC provides the trust of BPs in their lifecycles; (2) identifying the relations of BPM as the need and BC as the solution with the assessment towards BPM characteristics; (3) discussing the up-to-date progresses of critical BC in BPM; (4) identifying the challenges and research directions for future advancement in the domain. The main conclusions of our comprehensive review are (1) the study of adopting BC in BPM has attracted a great deal of attention that has been evidenced by a rapidly growing number of relevant articles. (2) The paradigms of BPM over Internet of Things (IoT) have been shifted from persistent to transient, from static to dynamic, and from centralized to decentralized, and new enabling technologies are highly demanded to fulfill some emerging functional requirements (FRs) at the stages of design, configuration, diagnosis, and evaluation of BPs in their lifecycles. (3) BC has been intensively studied and proven as a promising solution to assure the trustiness for both of business processes and their executions in decentralized BPM. (4) Most of the reported BC applications are at their primary stages, future research efforts are needed to meet the technical challenges involved in interoperation, determination of trusted entities, confirmation of time-sensitive execution, and support of irreversibility

Business Grid Services

Grid services have come to represent the synthesis of web services and grid computing paradigms. Web services provide the means to modularize software, enabling loosely coupled and novel synthesis. Grid computing removes the binding between functional software components and specific hosting hardware, enabling software to be deployed dynamically over a network (e.g. intra-, extra- or inter-net). Applying the constructs of grid computing to the service orientation of enterprise software will allow business service networks to utilize more specialized services. An upper service ontology that enables business grid services to be described and then related to the grid hosting platform is presented. Explicit knowledge is required for enterprise software, hosting servers and the domain that can then be utilized by both SLA and reservation systems. The ontology presented is derived from and validated using a collection of web services taken from leading investment banks

Cross-Collaboration Processes based on Blockchain and IoT: a survey

Cross-collaboration processes are decentralized by nature and their centralized monitoring can trigger mistrust. Nevertheless, a decentralized monitoring facility such as a blockchain-based and Internet-of-Things-aware (IoT-aware) business process management system can reduce this pitfall. However, concerns related to usability, privacy, and performance, hamper the wide adoption of these systems. To better understand the challenges at stake, this paper reviews the use of blockchain and IoT devices in cross-collaboration processes. This survey sheds some light on standard uses such as model engineering or permissioned blockchains which help adopt cross-collaboration business process management systems. Moreover, with respect to process design, two schools of thought coexist, addressing both constrained and loosely processes. Furthermore, a focus on data-centric processes appears to get some momentum, as many industries go digital. Finally, this survey underlines the need to orient future research towards a more flexible, scalable, and data-aware blockchain-based business process management system