How Advanced Change Patterns Impact the Process of Process Modeling

Process model quality has been an area of considerable research efforts. In this context, correctness-by-construction as enabled by change patterns provides promising perspectives. While the process of process modeling (PPM) based on change primitives has been thoroughly investigated, only little is known about the PPM based on change patterns. In particular, it is unclear what set of change patterns should be provided and how the available change pattern set impacts the PPM. To obtain a better understanding of the latter as well as the (subjective) perceptions of process modelers, the arising challenges, and the pros and cons of different change pattern sets we conduct a controlled experiment. Our results indicate that process modelers face similar challenges irrespective of the used change pattern set (core pattern set versus extended pattern set, which adds two advanced change patterns to the core patterns set). An extended change pattern set, however, is perceived as more difficult to use, yielding a higher mental effort. Moreover, our results indicate that more advanced patterns were only used to a limited extent and frequently applied incorrectly, thus, lowering the potential benefits of an extended pattern set

Process Change Patterns: Recent Research, Use Cases, Research Directions

In previous work, we introduced change patterns to foster a systematic comparison of process-aware information systems with respect to change support. This paper revisits change patterns and shows how our research activities have evolved. Further, it presents characteristic use cases and gives insights into current research directions

Change Patterns for Process Families

The increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAISs), together with the variability of business processes (BPs), has resulted in large collections of related process model variants (i.e., process families). To effectively deal with process families, several proposals (e.g., C-EPC, Provop) exist that extend BP modeling languages with variability-specific constructs. While fostering reuse and reducing modeling efforts, respective constructs imply additional complexity and demand proper support for process designers when creating and modifying process families. Recently, generic and language-independent adaptation patterns were successfully introduced for creating and evolving single BP models. However, they are not sufficient to cope with the specific needs for modeling and evolving process families. This paper suggests a complementary set of generic and language-independent change patterns specifically tailored to the needs of process families. When used in combination with existing adaptation patterns, change patterns for process families will enable the modeling and evolution of process families at a high-level of abstraction. Further, they will serve as reference for implementing tools or comparing proposals managing process families

AUTOMATED PLANNING OF PROCESS MODELS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF SIMPLE MERGES

Business processes evolve dynamically with changing business demands. Because of these fast changes, traditional process improvement techniques have to be adapted and extended since they often require a high degree of manual work. To reduce this degree of manual work, the automated planning of process models is proposed. In this context, we present a novel approach for an automated construction of the control flow structure simple merge (XOR join). This accounts for a necessary step towards an auto-mated planning of entire process models. Here we build upon a planning domain, which gives us a general and formal basis to apply our approach independently from a specific process modeling lan-guage. To analyze the feasibility of our method, we mathematically evaluate the approach in terms of key properties like termination and completeness. Moreover, we implement the approach in a process planning software and apply it to several real-world processes

Assisted mashup development: On the discovery and recommendation of mashup composition knowledge

Over the past few years, mashup development has been made more accessible with tools such as Yahoo! Pipes that help in making the development task simpler through simplifying technologies. However, mashup development is still a difficult task that requires knowledge about the functionality of web APIs, parameter settings, data mappings, among other development efforts. In this work, we aim at assisting users in the mashup process by recommending development knowledge that comes in the form of reusable composition knowledge. This composition knowledge is harvested from a repository of existing mashup models by mining a set of composition patterns, which are then used for interactively providing composition recommendations while developing the mashup. When the user accepts a recommendation, it is automatically woven into the partial mashup model by applying modeling actions as if they were performed by the user. In order to demonstrate our approach we have implemented Baya, a Firefox plugin for Yahoo! Pipes that shows that it is indeed possible to harvest useful composition patterns from existing mashups, and that we are able to provide complex recommendations that can be automatically woven inside Yahoo! Pipes' web-based mashup editor

Recommendation and weaving of reusable mashup model patterns for assisted development

With this article, we give an answer to one of the open problems of mashup development that users may face when operating a model-driven mashup tool, namely the lack of modeling expertise. Although commonly considered simple applications, mashups can also be complex software artifacts depending on the number and types of Web resources (the components) they integrate. Mashup tools have undoubtedly simplified mashup development, yet the problem is still generally nontrivial and requires intimate knowledge of the components provided by the mashup tool, its underlying mashup paradigm, and of how to apply such to the integration of the components. This knowledge is generally neither intuitive nor standardized across different mashup tools and the consequent lack of modeling expertise affects both skilled programmers and end-user programmers alike. In this article, we show how to effectively assist the users of mashup tools with contextual, interactive recommendations of composition knowledge in the form of reusable mashup model patterns. We design and study three different recommendation algorithms and describe a pattern weaving approach for the one-click reuse of composition knowledge. We report on the implementation of three pattern recommender plugins for different mashup tools and demonstrate via user studies that recommending and weaving contextual mashup model patterns significantly reduces development times in all three cases

Checking the Compliance of Business Process in Business Process Life Cycle

International audienceBusiness process compliance has become more and more important function for business process management (BPM). One of challenges in this area is to check the business process compliance in the business process life-cycle (design-time, run-time). In this paper, we propose a description logic-based approach for business process compliance checking during two phases of the business process life-cycle. In our approach, business process and the set of regulations are represented in a machine readable form. And we use that knowledge bases to check the compliance between them

A Ontology-based Approach for Business Process Compliance Checking

International audienceThe early detection of flaws and errors has become a significant feature of a business process modeling tool. This paper proposes an ontology-based approach for business process compliance checking. The business processes and the business rules are represented in a machine understandable form, a reasoner is used to reason on this knowledge base for detecting the potential semantic error by using a set of predefined rules

Variability management in process families through change patterns

© 2016. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Context: The increasing adoption of process-aware information systems together with the high variability in business processes has resulted in collections of process families. These families correspond to a business process model and its variants, which can comprise hundreds or thousands of different ways of realizing this process. Managing process variability in this context can be very challenging, labor-intensive, and error-prone, and new approaches for managing process families are necessary. Objective: We aim to facilitate variability management in process families, ensure process family correctness, and reduce the effort needed for such purposes. Method: We have derived a set of change patterns for process families from variability-specific language constructs identified in the literature. For validation, we have conducted a case study with a safety standard in which we have measured the number of operations needed to model and evolve the variability of the standard with and without the patterns. Results: We present 10 change patterns for managing variability in process families and show how they can be implemented. The patterns support the modeling and evolution of process families and ensure process family correctness by automatically introducing and deleting modeling elements. The case study results show that the application of the defined change patterns can reduce the number of operations when modeling a process family by 34% and when evolving it by 40%. Conclusions: The application of the change patterns can help in effectively modeling and evolving large and highly-variable process families. Their application can also considerably reduce variability management effort. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work has been developed with the financial support of Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the project SMART-ADAPT TIN2013-42981-P. We also want to thank Barbara Weber and Manfred Reichert for their valuable input and feedback on the design and development of the set of change patterns for process families.Ayora Esteras, C.; Torres Bosch, MV.; De La Vara González, JL.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2016). Variability management in process families through change patterns. Information and Software Technology. 74:86-104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2016.01.007S861047