Dealing with change in process choreographies: Design and implementation of propagation algorithms

Enabling process changes constitutes a major challenge for any process-aware information system. This not only holds for processes running within a single enterprise, but also for collaborative scenarios involving distributed and autonomous partners. In particular, if one partner adapts its private process, the change might affect the processes of the other partners as well. Accordingly, it might have to be propagated to concerned partners in a transitive way. A fundamental challenge in this context is to find ways of propagating the changes in a decentralized manner. Existing approaches are limited with respect to the change operations considered as well as their dependency on a particular process specification language. This paper presents a generic change propagation approach that is based on the Refined Process Structure Tree, i.e., the approach is independent of a specific process specification language. Further, it considers a comprehensive set of change patterns. For all these change patterns, it is shown that the provided change propagation algorithms preserve consistency and compatibility of the process choreography. Finally, a proof-of-concept prototype of a change propagation framework for process choreographies is presented. Overall, comprehensive change support in process choreographies will foster the implementation and operational support of agile collaborative process scenarios

Conceptualising IT Consulting Services: An Approach from IT-Business Alignment Models and Design Sciences

The constant integration of business and manufacturing processes is a difficult task that can be facilitated through IT consulting services. However, if these services do not adequately address the problems of alignment between IT and business, efficiency in integration can be seriously compromised. This article presents a methodology that systematises IT consulting services for the acquisition, incorporation, and integration of IT elements in an organisation in such a way that is aligned with the business and by contemplating its contribution to the value chain. The proposal is based on a set of rules, methods, guidelines, patterns, and artefacts that define a flow of action and implement a strategy that provides a consulting solution as a final result. Likewise, a method is proposed to evaluate the applied methodology and the solution obtained. For validation of the method, a set of business processes based on a case study applied in several Cuban companies related to the food sector has been defined to help adjust the parameters and corroborate the generalisation of the proposal. This research allows to ensure the alignment of business and IT to avoid the failure in the incorporation of IT to companies. It also analyzes and establishes the ideal artefacts for IT consulting and generates an IT consulting methodology that makes the analysis of consultants more robust in order to guarantee the success of incorporating IT into companies.This work has been supported by grant TIN2016-78103-C2-2-R and University of Alicante [GRE14-02 and SmartUniversity2017]

Alignment and Change Propagation between Business Processes and Service-Oriented Architectures

International audienceIncreasing the productivity of the Service-Oriented Software Engineering through a model-driven methodology needs to go beyond business services modeling and the automation of transforming models that adhere to the SOA style. Commonly, the business analysts focus on modeling business processes. Then, IT developers implement software architectures that are automatically generated from the process models. In this paper we look forward to maintaining the alignment between business services and their supporting IT assets when business settings evolve. We introduce an approach for an incremental synchronization between business process models and component configuration models that follow SOA architectural principles.We automate the change forward propagation by enforcing in-place translations of the updates on the models in order to preserve their consistency. Rather than executing the entire development process again, software architects can assess the necessity of propagating design decisions to the implementation level by adapting the deployed IT assets according to the business evolutions

Método de integración inteligente de procesos de negocio sensible y adaptado al contexto

La Integración de procesos de negocio permite consolidar un conjunto de modelos de proceso en una sola descripción, con el fin de realizar actividades de mantenimiento y/o actualización sobre los ellos. Por lo anterior, es importante seleccionar aquellos procesos que soporten dichas actividades sin afectar su resultado y rendimiento. En esta tesis de doctorado se propone un método de integración de procesos de negocio, con capacidad de razonamiento sobre el contexto. El método propuesto consta de cuatro fases secuenciales e iterativas a saber, Fase 1. Definición del objetivo de integración, Fase 2. Búsqueda y recuperación de variantes, Fase 3. Integración y Fase 4. Propagación y ejecución. Adicionalmente, se propone un modelo de contexto que soporta el método, el cual está compuesto por entidades, situaciones y restricciones, al cual se integra una ontología de contexto de variantes, que identifica los recursos involucrados a partir de una situación contextual presente. El razonamiento inteligente se soporta por un sistema multi-agente que captura información del contexto, identifica situaciones, realiza agrupamiento de variantes y propagación de cambios; obteniendo como resultado la lista de variantes a integrar. Finalmente, se construye un prototipo de validación, que facilita la simulación de escenarios y la ejecución de los procesos. La validación del método se realizó mediante la definición y aplicación del método a cuatro casos de estudio; así mismo, para el análisis de resultados, se utilizaron métricas de valoración cualitativa y cuantitativa. Los resultados obtenidos fueron satisfactorios, lo cual demuestra la utilidad, la validez y el alcance del métodoAbstract: Business process integration allows to consolidate a set of process models in a single description, in order to carry out maintenance and updating activities. Therefore, it is important to select those processes that support these activities without affecting their results and performance. In this PhD thesis, a BPI method with the ability to reason on the context is proposed, This method is composed by four sequential and iterative steps. Step 1. Definition of the integration objective, Step 2. Search and recovery of variants, Step 3. Integration and Step 4. Propagation and execution. Additionally, a context model composed by entities, situations and constraints is proposed to supports the method. Likewise an ontology of variant context is integrated; it focus is to identify the resources involved from actived contextual situation. Intelligent reasoning is supported by a multi-agent system that captures information from the context, identifies situations, performs clustering of variants and change propagation; obtaining as a overcome the variants to integrate. Finally, a validation prototype is constructed, which facilitates the simulation of scenarios and the execution of the processes. The validation of the method was carried out by defining and applying the method to four case studies; likewise, for the analysis of results, qualitative and quantitative valuation metrics were used. The results obtained were satisfactory, which shows the usefulness, validity and scope of the method.Doctorad