Modeling of IoT devices in Business Processes: A Systematic Mapping Study

[EN] The Internet of Things (IoT) enables to connect the physical world to digital business processes (BP). By using the IoT, a BP can, e.g.: 1) take into account real-world data to take more informed business decisions, and 2) automate and/or improve BP tasks. To achieve these benefits, the integration of IoT and BPs needs to be successful. The first step to this end is to support the modeling of IoT-enhanced BPs. Although numerous researchers have studied this subject, it is unclear what is the current state of the art in terms of current modeling solutions and gaps. In this work, we carry out a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) to find out how current solutions are modelling IoT into business processes. After studying 600 papers, we identified and analyzed in depth a total of 36 different solutions. In addition, we report on some important issues that should be addressed in the near future, such as, for instance the lack of standardization.This research has been funded by Internal Funds KU Leuven (Interne Fondsen KU Leuven) and the financial support of the Spanish State Research Agency under the project TIN2017-84094-R and co-financed with ERDF.Torres Bosch, MV.; Serral, E.; Valderas, P.; Pelechano Ferragud, V.; Grefen, P. (2020). Modeling of IoT devices in Business Processes: A Systematic Mapping Study. IEEE. 221-230. https://doi.org/10.1109/CBI49978.2020.00031S22123

Can process mining automatically describe care pathways of patients with long-term conditions in UK primary care? A study protocol

Introduction In the UK, primary care is seen as the optimal context for delivering care to an ageing population with a growing number of long-term conditions. However, if it is to meet these demands effectively and efficiently, a more precise understanding of existing care processes is required to ensure their configuration is based on robust evidence. This need to understand and optimise organisational performance is not unique to healthcare, and in industries such as telecommunications or finance, a methodology known as ‘process mining’ has become an established and successful method to identify how an organisation can best deploy resources to meet the needs of its clients and customers. Here and for the first time in the UK, we will apply it to primary care settings to gain a greater understanding of how patients with two of the most common chronic conditions are managed. Methods and analysis The study will be conducted in three phases; first, we will apply process mining algorithms to the data held on the clinical management system of four practices of varying characteristics in the West Midlands to determine how each interacts with patients with hypertension or type 2 diabetes. Second, we will use traditional process mapping exercises at each practice to manually produce maps of care processes for the selected condition. Third, with the aid of staff and patients at each practice, we will compare and contrast the process models produced by process mining with the process maps produced via manual techniques, review differences and similarities between them and the relative importance of each. The first pilot study will be on hypertension and the second for patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes

A METHOD FOR CONTEXT MODELLING IN CAPABILITY MANAGEMENT

Enterprises exist in the context of their dynamically changing environment, which has a strong impact on service design and delivery. Within areas such as ambient intelligence or robotics, most relevant context has a physical nature. However, the context of an enterprise requires a different conceptual-ization of context awareness. Beyond physical context, enterprises need to be aware of their market, legal and social context. Moreover, in order to monitor context and configure services systematically, we need a context modelling method that is integrated within enterprise modelling and supports in-formation and communication technology (ICT) engineering and runtime. The work in this paper has been performed as part of developing Capability Driven Development (CDD), a new paradigm for ICT design where services are customised on the basis of the essential business capabilities and deliv-ery is adjusted according to the current context. The contributions of the paper are (i) the investiga-tion of industrial needs for context modelling, (ii) eCoM, a context modelling method for enterprise ICT addressing such needs, iii) application of the method in an industrial use case and (iv) the evolu-tion of eCoM based on various evaluation cycles by means of Framework for Evaluation in Design Science Research (FEDS)

Social Computing for Software Engineering: a Mapping Study.

There is a continual growth in the use of social computing within a breadth of business domains; such as marketing, public engagement and innovation management. Software engineering research, like other similar disciplines, has re- cently started to harness the power of social computing throughout the various development phases; from requirements elicitation to validation and maintenance and for the various methods of development and structures of development teams. However, despite this increasing effort, we still lack a clear picture of the current status of this research. To address that lack of knowledge, we conduct a systematic mapping study on the utilisation of social computing for software engineering. This will inform researchers and practitioners about the current status and progress of the field including the areas of current focus and the geographical and chronological distribution of the research. We do the mapping across a diversity of dimensions including the activities of software engineering, the types of research, the characteristics of social computing and the demographic attributes of the published work. Our study results show a growing interest in the field, mainly in academia, and a general trend toward developing designated social com- puting platforms and utilising them in mainly four software engineering areas; management, coding, requirements engineering, and maintenance and enhancement

Blockchains for Business Process Management - Challenges and Opportunities

Blockchain technology promises a sizable potential for executing inter-organizational business processes without requiring a central party serving as a single point of trust (and failure). This paper analyzes its impact on business process management (BPM). We structure the discussion using two BPM frameworks, namely the six BPM core capabilities and the BPM lifecycle. This paper provides research directions for investigating the application of blockchain technology to BPM.Comment: Preprint for ACM TMI

Partial-order-based process mining: a survey and outlook

The field of process mining focuses on distilling knowledge of the (historical) execution of a process based on the operational event data generated and stored during its execution. Most existing process mining techniques assume that the event data describe activity executions as degenerate time intervals, i.e., intervals of the form [t, t], yielding a strict total order on the observed activity instances. However, for various practical use cases, e.g., the logging of activity executions with a nonzero duration and uncertainty on the correctness of the recorded timestamps of the activity executions, assuming a partial order on the observed activity instances is more appropriate. Using partial orders to represent process executions, i.e., based on recorded event data, allows for new classes of process mining algorithms, i.e., aware of parallelism and robust to uncertainty. Yet, interestingly, only a limited number of studies consider using intermediate data abstractions that explicitly assume a partial order over a collection of observed activity instances. Considering recent developments in process mining, e.g., the prevalence of high-quality event data and techniques for event data abstraction, the need for algorithms designed to handle partially ordered event data is expected to grow in the upcoming years. Therefore, this paper presents a survey of process mining techniques that explicitly use partial orders to represent recorded process behavior. We performed a keyword search, followed by a snowball sampling strategy, yielding 68 relevant articles in the field. We observe a recent uptake in works covering partial-order-based process mining, e.g., due to the current trend of process mining based on uncertain event data. Furthermore, we outline promising novel research directions for the use of partial orders in the context of process mining algorithms

The notion of specialization in the i*framework

This thesis provides a formal proposal for the specialization relationship in the i* framework that allows its use in a well-defined manner. I root my proposal over existing works in different areas that are interested in representing knowledge: knowledge representation from Artificial Intelligence and conceptual modeling and object-oriented programming languages from Software Development. Also, I use the results of a survey conducted in the i* community that provides some insights about what i* modelers expect from specialization. As a consequence of this twofold analysis, I identify three specialization operations: extension, refinement and redefinition. For each of them, I: - motivate its need and provide some rationale; - distinguish the several cases that can occur in each operation; - define the elements involved in each of these cases and the correctness conditions that must be fulfilled; - demonstrate by induction the fulfilment of the conditions identified for preserving satisfaction; - provide some illustrative examples in the context of an exemplar about travel agencies and travelers. The specialization relationship is offered by the i* framework through the is-a construct defined over actors (a subactor is-a superactor) since it was first released. Although the overall meaning of this construct is highly intuitive, its effects at the level of intentional elements and dependencies are not always clear, hampering seriously its appropriate use. In order to be able to reason about correctness and satisfaction, I define previously the conditions that must be preserved when a specialization takes place. In addition, I provide a methodology with well-defined steps that contextualize the formal aspects of this thesis in a development process. As a conclusion, this thesis is making possible the use of the specialization relationship in i* in a precise, non-ambiguous manner