Business Process Simulation Using Coloured Petri Nets

Äriprotsesside juhtimine on tänapäeva maailmas muutunud järjest olulisemaks tänu suurenevatele nõudmistele protsesside tõhusamaks muutmisel. Protsesside juhtimisega üritatakse leida võimalikke kitsaskohti, tõsta tootlikust ja vähendada vajadust ressursside järjele. Paljud protsesside modelleerimise vahendid toetavad lisaks protsesside modelleerimisele mudelite juurutamist ning simulatsioone. Simulatsioonid on üks parimaid tehnikaid protsesside efektiivsemaks muutmisel. Enamus äriprotsesside modelleerimise standardeid ei toeta simulatsioone (k.a. de facto standard BPMN). Mitmed protsesside modelleerimise vahendid võimaldavad simulatsioone, kuid simulatsioonimootor on peidetud nende vahendite sisse. See piirab simulatsioonimootorite laiendatavust ning protsesside simulatsioonides tuleb läbi ajada tarkvara vahenditega. Kuid modelleerimistarkvara võimalused on võrreldes reaalse maailma situatsioonidega väga piiratud. Antud töö eesmärgiks on välja pakkuda eelpool mainitud probleemile üks võimalik lahendus – BPMN meta-mudeli laiendus simulatsiooni atribuutidega. Töös kasutatakse simulatsioonimootorit CPN Tools, mis baseerub Coloured Petri Nets (CPN) modelleerimis-keelel. CPN on loodud spetsiaalselt diskreetsete süsteemide simulatsiooni keeleks. Esmalt tehakse ülevaade BPMN standardist ning kahest levinumast BPMN modelleerimise vahendist – IBM WebSphere Modeller ja IPT Commerce. Järgnevalt antakse lühiülevaade Petri Nets ja CPN mudelitest ning CPN Tools modelleerimisvahendist. Kasutades olemasolevate vahendite analüüsist saadud kogemusi, laiendatakse BPMN standardi meta-mudelit simulatsioonide meta-mudeliga. Seejärel kirjeldatakse kuidas saada simulatsiooni andmetega täiendatud BPMN mudelist CPN mudel ning demonstreeritakse erinevaid võimalusi CPN mudelite simuleerimiseks kasutades CPN Tools vahendeid. Töös kirjeldatud simulatsiooni meta-mudel ja BPMN mudeli elementide teisendamine CPN mudeli konstruktsioonideks on esitatud üldiselt, sest eesmärgiks oli testida välja pakutava lahenduse võimalikkust. CPN Tools sai valitud simulatsioonimootoriks sellepärast, et tema mudelid on kirjeldatud kasutades XML-i. Töö edasiarendusena pakub autor välja BPMN mudelitest CPN mudelite automaatse konverteri loomist.Business process management plays an increasingly important role in the business world as it promotes effectiveness and efficiency in business operations. The simulation of business processes is one of the most versatile techniques for analyzing business processes quantitatively in order to identify and remove performance bottlenecks. The graphical representation of business process models has proven to be a very effective tool for presenting information to business stakeholders, including business analysts and system developers. Unfortunately most of the graphical business process modeling standards (including de facto standard BPMN) do not support attaching simulation information to the models. Major business process modelling tools and suites still provide ability to add simulation data and execute those models. However, only models designed with the tools themselves can be simulated and no extensibility mechanism is provided to add new features or change the pre-built simulation and reporting options. This paper proposes a meta-model for specifying simulation scenarios on the top of the BPMN meta-model. Also, the paper advocates using CPN Tools as an open and extensible business process model simulator. The paper provides an initial design of a transformation from BPMN process models to CPN models. The proposed design has been validated through one fully-worked case study

An Embedded Domain Specific Language to Model, Transform and Quality Assure Business Processes in Business-Driven Development

Business process models are produced by business analysts to graphically communicate the business requirements to IT specialists. As business processes are updated to meet the new demands in the competitive market, the underlying IT solution is adapted, to reflect precisely the current goals of the organisation. The models should then act as an abstract representation of the solution. It is essential to adapt to Business-Driven Development (BDD), whereby models are refined into the IT solution and implemented in a Service-Oriented Architecture. This means that models must be free from data and control-flow errors, such as deadlocks. If models are not quality assured at the modelling phase, errors would be discovered later and the entire BDD lifecycle would have to be repeated. Combining model transformations with quality assurance would help modellers to preserve the correctness of models and rapidly carry out modifications. Although various modelling languages have been developed to assist modellers in the production of high quality business process models, none of them adopted a functional approach, based on higher-order logic. As BDD is being adopted by most organisations, the need for such a language is becoming more evident. Since specialized functionality is required, a general-purpose language is not really necessary. Instead, a domain-specific language which provides the right abstraction and captures precisely the semantics of the business process modelling domain, should be developed. The definitions of the models would be easy to comprehend and reason about, by anyone who is not necessarily an IT specialist. However, since languages are made up of domain independent and dependent linguistic components, it is more cost effective and feasible to embed the new language in a general-purpose language. In this project we present a domain specific language embedded in the functional language, Haskell, to model, transform and quality assure business processes in Business-Driven Development. By adopting a functional approach, we developed a language: 1) with which various models can rapidly be produced in a concise and abstract manner, 2) allows users to focus on the required behaviour rather than its implementation, 3) ensures that all the required details, to generate the executable code, are specified, 4) the abstract representation can be interpreted, analysed and transformed in various ways, 5) quality assures models by carrying out three types of checks; by Haskell’s type checker, at construction-time through our embedded type system, and by specialised functions that analyse the components in the model. By embedding our language in Haskell, the models, quality assurance checks and transformations are essentially functions which can easily be composed and defined. Connection patterns, defined in the language, play an important role to ensure that definitions are concise, readable and easy to comprehend. Different from other previous modelling tools, users are able to define their own parameterized models and transformations. By generating a directed graph for the models, various types of analysis can be carried out with greater ease. Moreover, quality assurance can be combined to model transformations by declaratively defining pre and post conditions for each transformation. These conditions as well as transformations can easily be composed of other previously defined checks or transformations. With this language, we aim to capture the domain semantics of IBM’s WebSphere Business Modeler Advanced v6.0.2

Návrh a implementace přístupu prediktivní údržby v laboratorním mechatronickém systému

This project monitors the performance of a mechatronic device in a cloud platform called IBM Cloud. If the monitoring value reaches a certain condition, then it will automatically alert the user to call for maintenance duty by doing predictive learning analysis. The goal of this project is to create a cloud application for the data from the mechatronic system to perform the predictive maintenance operation in real time using machine learning tools such as SPSS modeler, streams flow, Watson studio and Watson IoT platform. This is achieved by sending the mechatronic system data through IoT2040, which is an interface that transforms data from S7-1500 PLC to IBM cloud by using Node-Red programming. The SPSS model is created by training the sample data using a neural network framework and connected with mechatronic system data in Streams flow. Then the streams flow analyses the data in Real-time and shows the alert in the Dashboard. This alert signal is sent back to PLC to generate a maintenance alert in the system before it affects the mechatronic system.Tento projekt sleduje výkon mechatronického zařízení v cloudové platformě IBM Cloud. Pokud monitorovaná hodnota dosáhne určité podmínky, pak bude automaticky upozorňovat uživatele, aby požadoval o údržbu, a to pomocí prediktivní analýzy učení. Cílem našeho projektu je vytvořit cloudovou aplikaci pro data z mechatronického systému pro provádění prediktivní údržby v reálném čase pomocí nástrojů strojového učení, jako je modeláře SPSS, Streams flow, studio Watson a platforma Watson IoT. Toho je dosaženo zasláním mechatronických systémových dat skrze IoT2040, což je rozhraní, které transformuje data z S7-1500 PLC do cloudu IBM pomocí programování Node-Red. Model SPSS je vytvořen trénováním dat vzorku pomocí neuronové sítě a propojen s mechatronickými systémovými daty v Streams flow. Pak Streams flow analyzuje data v reálném čase a zobrazuje výstrahu v řídicím panelu. Tento výstražný signál je odeslán zpět do PLC, aby generoval výstrahu údržby v systému předtím, než ovlivní mechatronický systém.450 - Katedra kybernetiky a biomedicínského inženýrstvídobř

Computer assisted mathematical programming

A Computer Assisted Mathematical Programming (Modelling) System (CAMPS) is described in this paper. The system uses program generator techniques for model creation and contrasts with earlier approaches which use a special purpose language to construct models. Thus no programming skill is required to formulate a model. In designing the system we have first analysed the salient components of the mathematical programming activity. A mathematical programming model is usually constructed by progressive definition of dimensions, data tables, model variables, model constraints and the matrix coefficients which connect the last two entities. Computer assistance is provided to structure the data and the resulting model in the above sequence. In addition to this novel feature and the automatic documentation facility, the system is in line with recent developments, and incorporates a friendly and flexible user interface

Analysis and improvement of business process models using spreadsheets

Software in general is thoroughly analyzed before it is released to its users. Business processes often are not - at least not as thoroughly as it could be - before they are released to their users, e.g., employees or software agents. This paper ascribes this practice to the lack of suitable instruments for business process analysts, who design the processes, and aims to provide them with the necessary instruments to allow them to also analyze their processes. We use the spreadsheet paradigm to represent business process analysis tasks, such as writing metrics and assertions, running performance analysis and verification tasks, and reporting on the outcomes, and implement a spreadsheet-based tool for business process analysis. The results of two independent user studies demonstrate the viability of the approach

Customer Demographic Segmentation Based On Telecom Behavioral Data

In the modern world, digitalization becomes ubiquitous and covers almost every aspect of the business and daily life. Telecom services providers have a major role in these processes due to their involvement in collecting, storing and processing enormous amounts of customer data. This also includes personal telecom services usage data, which if correctly interpreted, might be used for many different purposes. Using telecom data to predict certain demographic characteristics of the customers is helpful in more than one aspect: 1) It could add the acquired knowledge into customer segmentation to better target different customer groups. 2) Such data could be used in cases where traditional historic data is not available- the potential strength of predicting customer credit worthiness based on behavior data is still not fully explored. 3) Last but definitely not least, is the use of data for verifying customer identification in fraud detection. In this paper, an overview of some successful use of telecom data for non-telecom services is shown, as well as with a set of real telco data, statistical techniques are used to demonstrate the relation between mobile telecom services usage and subscription owners’ age. Use of alternative customer data could have enormous implication both on traditional predictive models and could alter the role of the telecoms, making them one of the most important information sources for financial institutions, which operate with sensitive customer data