BPMNt : a proposal for flexible process tailoring representation in BPMN /

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a de-facto standard for business process modeling, which focuses on the representation of the process behavior. However, it can also succeed in representing the behavior of software processes, since they are a type of business process. Although BPMN has been extensively used for modeling processes in different domains, its standard specification does not have any mechanism to support users in activities related to process adaptation (tailoring). Moreover, researches extending BPMN are based on complex consolidated models, which hamper the analysis and maintenance of individual variant process models and are not appropriate for application domains in which process variations are difficult to predict, such as in software development processes. Thus, our objective was to provide a BPMN-compliant extension and associated mechanisms for specifying flexible process tailoring on models produced with this language while ensuring the correctness of adapted process models and explicitly capturing change traces. We have focused our research on the domains of Software Process Engineering (SPE) and Business Process Management (BPM). At last, we evaluated the applicability of the proposal for representing realistic tailoring scenarios in both domains.BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) é um padrão para modelagem de processos de negócio, que tem seu foco na representação do comportamento de processos. No entanto, ele pode também ser usado para representar o comportamento de processos de software, já que eles são um tipo de processo de negócio. Embora BPMN tem sido extensivamente usado para modelar processos em diferentes domínios, sua especificação padrão não possui nenhum mecanismo para apoiar usuários em atividades relacionadas à adaptação de processos. Pesquisas que estendem o padrão são baseadas em modelos complexos, que dificultam a análise e manutenção de modelos variantes, e não são apropriadas para domínios de aplicação onde variações de processo são difíceis de predizer, como em processos de desenvolvimento de software. Assim, nosso objetivo foi fornecer uma extensão para BPMN, chamada BPMNt, e mecanismos de suporte para especificar, de modo flexível, adaptações em processos modelados com esta linguagem. BPMNt deve também garantir a corretude de modelos adaptados e explicitamente capturar rastros de mudanças realizadas. Essa pesquisa teve como foco os domínios de Engenharia de Processos de Software e Gerenciamento de Processos de Negócio. Por fim, nós avaliamos a aplicabilidade da proposta para representar cenários de adaptação reais em ambos os domínios

Application of an Enterprise Modelling approach to deploy Systems Engineering processes in large organizations

Enterprise Modelling (EM) enables the representation of companies' activities, of their resources along with their roles and responsibilities in order to share the company's knowledge and support performance analysis. For this, EM promotes various concepts, techniques, frameworks, modelling languages and tools today widely used in companies. Currently, even a partial model of an enterprise constitutes a way to communicate, to share advices, to analyse and to make decisions. Therefore, EM appears to be a privileged tool to support any business change management. In a complementary way, Systems Engineering (SE) is a tried and tested methodological approach to design and test new products whatever their complexity or nature. Nowadays SE is considered in industry as a competitive and structured approach enabling a company to manage design activities and more generally to improve its capacity and ability to design complex systems efficiently. SE acts as a model-based engineering approach and promotes to this end a set of standardized collaborative processes, modelling languages and frameworks. Thus, when considering large companies designing complex systems such as a helicopter manufacturer, first it appears critical to be able to adapt processes proposed by SE standardization according to the business specific needs. This tailoring must be guided in order to consider the inherent complexity of the organization, the various human actors' profiles and skills, tools and stakeholders involved in the design of new products. As they all have to communicate and interact efficiently together their abilities and capacities to be interoperable i.e. to really work together should be analysed and improved accordingly before going further. Then, it appears necessary to prepare the company for the required changes, and to deploy in situ the adopted SE processes taking into account not only company's classical constrains and objectives but also the current level of interoperability of its elements. Finally, company managers must become able to control and adjust these processes from the cradle to the grave according to feedbacks from their stakeholders. To support all these activities, Enterprise Modelling (EM) provides several techniques, modelling languages, reference models and interoperability assessment methods which have been adapted and applied in this research work. The purpose of this article is threefold: 1) to provide a state of the art in interoperability, Systems Engineering (SE), and EM to illustrate how these disciplines are interrelated, to identify the needs they imply in the deployment, to discuss lacks in existing works considering these needs and thus to formulate how we aim to meet them, 2) to present an approach based on EM helping companies to lead changes required to apply SE principles and aiming to promote interoperability; and 3) to introduce the modelling environment proposed to support the approach including an ontology, an extension of BPMN 2.0 and software tools

Primitives: Design Guidelines and Architecture for BPMN Models

The Business Process Modeling Notation has emerged as a popular choice for representing processes among Business Analysts and Information Systems professionals. While the BPMN specification provides a rich syntax for the capture and representation of process models, it does not provide any guidance for the organization of the resulting models. As a consequence, large process libraries may become disorganized and hard to manage due to variability in abstraction levels, process interfaces, and activity descriptions. Based on the analysis of a process library in a US government agency we present a proposal for design guidelines and use our design guideline to qualitatively assess existing work on model quality guidance. To better organize models at different abstraction levels we propose a process architecture that allows for the systematic organization of BPMN models for different stakeholder concerns

INTEGRATING BUSINESS PROCESS CONCEPTS INTO UML ACTIVITY MODEL

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) activity model is widely accepted for modeling processes from pure technical views. Because it's rich high level design language and supported by standard body; OMG which involve most of top worldwide IT players. It turns out in modeling information systems, business processes are main component so needs suitable modeling language such as Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) that is originated in organization domain. However, learning new language has the cost of learning curve. Since UML activity model has commonality with BPMN as both share the core principles of process modeling, this paper proposes sustainable change to UML activity model by introducing business concepts so technical modelers can speak with UML activity a different language. This synergistic relationship not only doubles the benefit of UML activity and reduces the learning curve, but also highlight the differences that add value to editor providers. A light weight extension or profile has been designed and evaluated using a real case stud

BPMN4sML: A BPMN Extension for Serverless Machine Learning. Technology Independent and Interoperable Modeling of Machine Learning Workflows and their Serverless Deployment Orchestration

Machine learning (ML) continues to permeate all layers of academia, industry and society. Despite its successes, mental frameworks to capture and represent machine learning workflows in a consistent and coherent manner are lacking. For instance, the de facto process modeling standard, Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), managed by the Object Management Group, is widely accepted and applied. However, it is short of specific support to represent machine learning workflows. Further, the number of heterogeneous tools for deployment of machine learning solutions can easily overwhelm practitioners. Research is needed to align the process from modeling to deploying ML workflows. We analyze requirements for standard based conceptual modeling for machine learning workflows and their serverless deployment. Confronting the shortcomings with respect to consistent and coherent modeling of ML workflows in a technology independent and interoperable manner, we extend BPMN's Meta-Object Facility (MOF) metamodel and the corresponding notation and introduce BPMN4sML (BPMN for serverless machine learning). Our extension BPMN4sML follows the same outline referenced by the Object Management Group (OMG) for BPMN. We further address the heterogeneity in deployment by proposing a conceptual mapping to convert BPMN4sML models to corresponding deployment models using TOSCA. BPMN4sML allows technology-independent and interoperable modeling of machine learning workflows of various granularity and complexity across the entire machine learning lifecycle. It aids in arriving at a shared and standardized language to communicate ML solutions. Moreover, it takes the first steps toward enabling conversion of ML workflow model diagrams to corresponding deployment models for serverless deployment via TOSCA.Comment: 105 pages 3 tables 33 figure

BIM : a methodology to transform business processes into software systems

This manuscript proposes a guiding methodology to obtain a software system that supports the execution of the business processes existing within an organization. The methodology promotes the usage of business process reference models and intends to reduce the implementation time of the software systems. The methodology assumes four distinct phases and several abstraction levels and is applicable both when developing systems from scratch or in re-engineering contexts. The methodology embodies a special phase to handle the diversity of the business processes of an organization. By tailoring process reference models and by considering the characteristics of a specific organization, a proper set of business processes is derived for that organization. Then, we can obtain a suitable information system and implement its automatable parts in a software solution that can run on top of open source software frameworks. We also present four new supporting concepts to the methodology, and a summarized execution of it

On the evaluation of reference models for software engineering practice.

This paper argues that conceptual models and more specifically reference models play a key role in the specification and design of information systems. However, an effective evaluation strategy of such models is a relatively immature field. The paper presents the key challenges for this evaluation activity and articulates an approach for understanding how to evaluate models based on the information and cognitive theories of structuralism and conversation theory. An example of a reference model developed for the Higher Education domain is used as a case study to illustrate how the approach may be applied

Beyond the Classroom: Applying a Business Process Model of Weather Forecasting to Aviation Meteorology

Modern weather analysis and forecasting has become a very complex enterprise, with aspects that are purely scientific, and others that are business operations-related. At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University\u27s Daytona Beach campus, a business process model of the weather forecasting enterprise has been used as a teaching tool in the undergraduate course Forecasting Techniques. The model consists of two major, interrelated components, known as the Weather Information Processing Cycle (WIPC), and the Provider-User Relationship (FUR). The WIPC describes forecasting from the traditional scientific point of view, but contains user-focused processes such as product tailoring, dissemination, and user integration in addition to the familiar scientific processes such as data collection, analysis, and prediction. The PUR examines the business relationship between the provider of meteorological information and the user of that information. While the PUR provides a bridge for students to progress from studying basic forecasting techniques in the WIPC to examining the business relationship between weather information providers and users, there are applications of this model beyond the classroom. This paper introduces the model and shows how it can be applied to investigate the relationship between aviation weather information providers and users, using examples from the interagency Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) program