2,242 research outputs found

    Defining and Analysing Resource Assignments in Business Processes with RAL

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    Business process (BP) modelling notations tend to stray their attention from (human) resource management, unlike other aspects such as control flow or even data flow. They not only offer little intuitive languages to assign resources to BP activities, but neither link BPs with the structure of the organization where they are used, so BP models can easily contain errors such as the assignment of resources that do not belong to the organizational model. In this paper we address this problem and define RAL (Resource Assignment Language), a domainspecific language explicitly developed to assign resources to the activities of a BP model. RAL makes BPs aware of organizational structures. Besides, RAL semantics is based on an OWL-DL ontology, which enables the automatic analysis of resource assignment expressions, thus allowing the extraction of information from the resource assignments, and the detection of inconsistencies and assignment conflicts

    RAL Solver: a Tool to Facilitate Resource Management in Business Process Models

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    Business process (BP) modelling notations tend to stray their attention from resource management, unlike other aspects such as control flow or even data flow. On the one hand, the languages they offer to assign resources to BP activities are usually either little expressive, or hard to use for non-technical users. On the other hand, they barely care about the subsequent analysis of resource assignments, which would enable the detection of problems and/or inefficiency in the use of the resources available in a company. We present RAL Solver, a tool that addresses the two aforementioned issues, and thus: (i) allows the specification of assignments of resources to BP activities in a reasonably simple way; and (ii) provides capabilities to automatically analyse resource assignments at design time, which allows extracting information from BP models, and detecting inconsistencies and assignment conflicts

    Defining and Analysing Resource-Aware Process Performance Indicators

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    A key aspect to identify improvement points of the business processes (BP) of an organisation is to conduct performance management, which involves defining appropriate PPIs (Process Performance Indicators). Up to date, existing approaches to define and analyse PPIs usually focus on time and control flow aspects, leaving disregarded the organisational perspective. in this paper we extend PPINOT, a PPI metamodel, to support the definition of resource-aware PPIs in BPs enriched with resource information. Furthermore, leveraging the formal foundation of PPINOT, we introduce automated operations that relate PPIs to the people that may have an influence on them

    CRISTAL: Collection of Resource-Centric Supporting Tools and Languages

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    In this demo, we introduce CRISTAL (Collection of ResourcecentrIc Supporting Tools and Languages), a tool suite aimed at improving the human resource management capabilities of current Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs), covering the design and enactment phases of the business process (BP) life cycle. The central element is Resource Assignment Language (RAL), a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for specifying resource assignments in process models. RAL’s strong analysis capabilities enable the automated resolution of resource assignment expressions both (i) at design time, serving for post-design analysis to find and correct potential problems prior to execution, and (ii) at run time, in order to execute the BP in an existing BPMS considering the RAL assignments for resource allocation. The resource assignments can be directly modelled in a Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) diagram, or specified by means of a RACI matrix. in the latter case, CRISTAL can take all the RACI information automatically and introduce it into a resource-unaware BPMN model at any moment, resulting in a RACI-aware BP model (and, thus, a resource-aware BP model)

    RALph: A Graphical Notation for Resource Assignments in Business Processes

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    The business process (BP) resource perspective deals with the management of human as well as non-human resources throughout the process lifecycle. Although it has received increasing attention recently, there exists no graphical notation for it up until now that is both expressive enough to cover well-known resource selection conditions and independent of the BP modelling language. In this paper, we introduce RALph, a graphical notation for the assignment of human resources to BP activities. We define its semantics by mapping this notation to a language that has been formally defined in description logics, which enables its automated analysis. Although we show how RALph can be seamlessly integrated with BPMN, it is noteworthy that the notation is independent of the BP modelling language. Altogether, RALph will foster the visual modelling of the resource perspective in BP

    Specification and Automated Design-Time Analysis of the Business Process Human Resource Perspective

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    The human resource perspective of a business process is concerned with the relation between the activities of a process and the actors who take part in them. Unlike other process perspectives, such as control flow, for which many different types of analyses have been proposed, such as finding deadlocks, there is an important gap regarding the human resource perspective. Resource analysis in business processes has not been defined, and only a few analysis operations can be glimpsed in previous approaches. In this paper, we identify and formally define seven design-time analysis operations related to how resources are involved in process activities. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for a wide variety of resource-aware BP models, those analysis operations can be automated by leveraging Description Logic (DL) off-the-shelf reasoners. To this end, we rely on Resource Assignment Language (RAL), a domain-specific language that enables the definition of conditions to select the candidates to participate in a process activity. We provide a complete formal semantics for RAL based on DLs and extend it to address the operations, for which the control flow of the process must also be taken into consideration. A proof-of-concept implementation has been developed and integrated in a system called CRISTAL. As a result, we can give an automatic answer to different questions related to the management of resources in business processes at design time

    Methodology to Extend RAL

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    Resource Assignment Language (RAL) is a language for the selection of organisational resources that can be used, for example, for the assignment of human resources to business process activities. Its formal semantics have allowed the automation of analysis operations in several phases of the business process lifecycle. RAL was designed considering a specific organisational metamodel and pursuing specific purposes. However, it can be extended to deal with similar problems in different domains and under different circumstances. In this paper, a methodology to extend RAL is introduced, and an extension to support another organisational metamodel is described as a proof-of-concept. Keywords: business process management, description logics, RAL, resource assignment, W3C Organisation Ontolog

    Enhancing the management of resource-aware business processes

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    The resource perspective has received much less attention than other business process (BP) perspectives, e.g., control flow. This thesis focuses on human resource management in BPs, and addresses challenges related to resource specification and resource analysis. In particular, it introduces novel techniques for resource specification, which rely on a new resource selection language called RAL; and it provides automated support for a set of analysis operations at design time and at run time based on the formal semantics of RAL defined in description logics (DLs), by leveraging existing DL reasoners. All the contributions have been validated

    Adaptable Service Oriented Infrastructure Provisioning with Lightweight Containers Virtualization Technology

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    Modern computing infrastructures should enable realization of converged provisioning and governance operations on virtualized computing, storage and network resources used on behalf of users' workloads. These workloads must have ensured sufficient access to the resources to satisfy required QoS. This requires flexible platforms providing functionality for construction, activation and governance of Runtime Infrastructure which can be realized according to Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) paradigm. Implementation of the SOI management framework requires definition of flexible architecture and utilization of advanced software engineering and policy-based techniques. The paper presents an Adaptable SOI Provisioning Platform which supports adaptable SOI provisioning with lightweight virtualization, compliant with the structured process model suitable for construction, activation and governance of IT environments. The requirements, architecture and implementation of the platform are all discussed. Practical usage of the platform is presented on the basis of a complex case study for provisioning JEE middleware on top of the Solaris 10 lightweight virtualization platform
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