Change Mining in Adaptive Process Management Systems

The wide-spread adoption of process-aware information systems has resulted in a bulk of computerized information about real-world processes. This data can be utilized for process performance analysis as well as for process improvement. In this context process mining offers promising perspectives. So far, existing mining techniques have been applied to operational processes, i.e., knowledge is extracted from execution logs (process discovery), or execution logs are compared with some a-priori process model (conformance checking). However, execution logs only constitute one kind of data gathered during process enactment. In particular, adaptive processes provide additional information about process changes (e.g., ad-hoc changes of single process instances) which can be used to enable organizational learning. In this paper we present an approach for mining change logs in adaptive process management systems. The change process discovered through process mining provides an aggregated overview of all changes that happened so far. This, in turn, can serve as basis for all kinds of process improvement actions, e.g., it may trigger process redesign or better control mechanisms

Supporting user-oriented analysis for multi-view domain-specific visual languages

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Information and Software Technology. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2008 Elsevier B.V.The integration of usable and flexible analysis support in modelling environments is a key success factor in Model-Driven Development. In this paradigm, models are the core asset from which code is automatically generated, and thus ensuring model correctness is a fundamental quality control activity. For this purpose, a common approach is to transform the system models into formal semantic domains for verification. However, if the analysis results are not shown in a proper way to the end-user (e.g. in terms of the original language) they may become useless. In this paper we present a novel DSVL called BaVeL that facilitates the flexible annotation of verification results obtained in semantic domains to different formats, including the context of the original language. BaVeL is used in combination with a consistency framework, providing support for all steps in a verification process: acquisition of additional input data, transformation of the system models into semantic domains, verification, and flexible annotation of analysis results. The approach has been validated analytically by the cognitive dimensions framework, and empirically by its implementation and application to several DSVLs. Here we present a case study of a notation in the area of Digital Libraries, where the analysis is performed by transformations into Petri nets and a process algebra.Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and MODUWEB

KWM: Knowledge-based Workflow Model for agile organization

The workflow management system (WFMS) in an agile organization should be highly adaptable to the frequent organizational changes. To increase the adaptability of contemporary WFMSs, a mechanism for managing changes within the organizational structure and changes in business rules needs to be reinforced. In this paper, a knowledge-based approach for workflow modeling is proposed, in which a workflow is defined as a set of business rules. Knowledge on the organizational structure and special workflow, such as role/actor mappings and complex routing rules, can be explicitly modeled in KWM (Knowledge-based Workflow Model). Using knowledge representation scheme and dependency management facility, a change propagation mechanism is provided to adapt to the frequent changes in the organizational structure, business rules, and procedures

Adaptable processes

We propose the concept of adaptable processes as a way of overcoming the limitations that process calculi have for describing patterns of dynamic process evolution. Such patterns rely on direct ways of controlling the behavior and location of running processes, and so they are at the heart of the adaptation capabilities present in many modern concurrent systems. Adaptable processes have a location and are sensible to actions of dynamic update at runtime; this allows to express a wide range of evolvability patterns for concurrent processes. We introduce a core calculus of adaptable processes and propose two verification problems for them: bounded and eventual adaptation. While the former ensures that the number of consecutive erroneous states that can be traversed during a computation is bound by some given number k, the latter ensures that if the system enters into a state with errors then a state without errors will be eventually reached. We study the (un)decidability of these two problems in several variants of the calculus, which result from considering dynamic and static topologies of adaptable processes as well as different evolvability patterns. Rather than a specification language, our calculus intends to be a basis for investigating the fundamental properties of evolvable processes and for developing richer languages with evolvability capabilities

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Towards the Integration of Value and Coordination Models - Position Paper -

Cross-organizational collaborations have a high complexity.\ud Modelling these collaborations can be done from di®erent perspectives.\ud For example, the value perspective represents expected value exchanges\ud in a collaboration while the coordination perspective represents the order\ud in which these exchanges occur. How to maintain consistency between\ud di®erent models during design time as well as runtime constitutes a chal-\ud lenging topic. De¯ning criteria and de¯nitions re°ecting the relation be-\ud tween these models during the entire life cycle is not straightforward.\ud Di®erent criteria are used for di®erent models since each model captures\ud a speci¯c aspect of the collaboration. In this paper we investigate the\ud challenges arising when addressing the problem of maintaining adequate\ud and consistent models of a collaboration during the entire life cycle of\ud a collaboration. We propose a framework in which we connect business\ud layer, process layer and implementation layer, presenting the direction\ud for solving this multifaceted problem. We will describe several challenges\ud we anticipate to encounter while implementing our framework