BUSINESS PROCESS MODEL ANTI-PATTERNS: A BIBLIOGRAPHY AND TAXONOMY OF PUBLISHED WORK

Patterns have been proven to be useful for documenting reusable solutions to common problems. A recently published bibliography of business process model patterns shed light into the various types of patterns by providing a systematic categorization of these patterns. In this way, such classification improves the understanding of business process model patterns. Anti-patterns document a counterproductive solution to a commonly occurring problem. While a classification for the large body of literature on business process model patterns is available, a structured bibliography of anti-patterns is missing. Related work on anti-patterns discusses patterns for common modeling errors, problems in business process models as well as in the business processes. Modeling experts should be aware of all these types of anti-patterns. To fill this gap, this paper presents a bibliography of business process model anti-patterns and a taxonomy of anti-patterns that has been developed using an established approach for taxonomy development. Both are based on an literature review and are valuable for people during the design and analysis phases of business processes since knowledge about anti-patterns in business process models helps for increasing their quality. Our overview should also be useful for developers of modeling tools who wish to make the modeler aware of potential modeling problems

ANOMALIE W MODELOWANIU PROCESÓW BIZNESOWYCH

In the field of business process modeling the most popular is the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). BPMN is relevant from a practical point of view while at the same it offers many challenges for software developers and scientists. Specification of a BPMN diagram is relatively precise, but it is only a descriptive form presented at some abstract, graphical level. Most of the work in this area is focused on the use of the possibilities offered by BPMN notation. However, there is still no document analyzing the errors and how to detect and eliminate. The article attempts to analyze issues anomalies that may occur in the BPMN notation. The survey is based on the analysis of literature and own experience of modeling in BPMN. Analyzes allowed us to identify a few of the most common types of anomalies: syntactic anomalies, and structural anomalies.W dziedzinie procesów biznesowych najbardziej popularne jest modelowanie Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). BPMN jest istotny z praktycznego punktu widzenia, a przy tym oferuje wiele wyzwań dla programistów i naukowców. Specyfikacja diagramu BPMN jest stosunkowo precyzyjna, ale jest to tylko forma opisowa prezentowana na abstrakcyjnym poziomie graficznym. Większość prac w tym obszarze skoncentrowanych jest na wykorzystaniu możliwości, jakie oferuje notacja BPMN. Jednak wciąż nie ma dokumentów analizujących ewentualne błędy oraz sposoby ich wykrywania i eliminowania. Celem artykułu jest próba analizy zagadnienia anomalii, które mogą wystąpić w notacji BPMN. Badanie opiera się na analizie literatury oraz własnym doświadczeniu z modelowania w języku BPMN. Przeprowadzone analizy pozwoliły na zidentyfikowanie kilku najczęściej występujących rodzajów anomalii: strukturalnych i składniowych

BProVe: A formal verification framework for business process models

Business Process Modelling has acquired increasing relevance in software development. Available notations, such as BPMN, permit to describe activities of complex organisations. On the one hand, this shortens the communication gap between domain experts and IT specialists. On the other hand, this permits to clarify the characteristics of software systems introduced to provide automatic support for such activities. Nevertheless, the lack of formal semantics hinders the automatic verification of relevant properties. This paper presents a novel verification framework for BPMN 2.0, called BProVe. It is based on an operational semantics, implemented using MAUDE, devised to make the verification general and effective. A complete tool chain, based on the Eclipse modelling environment, allows for rigorous modelling and analysis of Business Processes. The approach has been validated using more than one thousand models available on a publicly accessible repository. Besides showing the performance of BProVe, this validation demonstrates its practical benefits in identifying correctness issues in real models

Ensuring the semantic correctness of a BAUML artifact-centric BPM

Context: Using models to represent business processes provides several advantages, such as facilitating the communication between the stakeholders or being able to check the correctness of the processes before their implementation. In contrast to traditional process modeling approaches, the artifact-centric approach treats data as a key element of the process, also considering the tasks or activities that are performed in it. Objective: This paper presents a way to verify and validate the semantic correctness of an artifact-centric business process model defined using a combination of UML and OCL models - a BAUML model. Method: We achieve our goal by presenting several algorithms that encode the initial models into first-order logic, which then allows to use an existing satisfiability checking tool to determine their correctness. Results: An approach to verify and validate an artifact-centric BPM specified in BAUML, which uses a combination of UML and OCL models. To do this, we provide a method to translate all BAUML components into a set of logic formulas. The result of this translation ensures that the only changes allowed are those specified in the model, and that those changes are taking place according the order established by the model. Having obtained this logic representation, these models can be validated by any existing reasoning method able to deal with negation of derived predicates. Moreover, we show how to automatically generate the relevant tests to validate the models. We also show the feasibility of our approach by implementing a prototype tool and applying it to a running example. Conclusion: It is feasible to ensure the semantic correctness of an artifact-centric business process model in practice.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Design considerations for workflow management systems use in production genomics research and the clinic

Abstract The changing landscape of genomics research and clinical practice has created a need for computational pipelines capable of efficiently orchestrating complex analysis stages while handling large volumes of data across heterogeneous computational environments. Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) are the software components employed to fill this gap. This work provides an approach and systematic evaluation of key features of popular bioinformatics WfMSs in use today: Nextflow, CWL, and WDL and some of their executors, along with Swift/T, a workflow manager commonly used in high-scale physics applications. We employed two use cases: a variant-calling genomic pipeline and a scalability-testing framework, where both were run locally, on an HPC cluster, and in the cloud. This allowed for evaluation of those four WfMSs in terms of language expressiveness, modularity, scalability, robustness, reproducibility, interoperability, ease of development, along with adoption and usage in research labs and healthcare settings. This article is trying to answer, which WfMS should be chosen for a given bioinformatics application regardless of analysis type?. The choice of a given WfMS is a function of both its intrinsic language and engine features. Within bioinformatics, where analysts are a mix of dry and wet lab scientists, the choice is also governed by collaborations and adoption within large consortia and technical support provided by the WfMS team/community. As the community and its needs continue to evolve along with computational infrastructure, WfMSs will also evolve, especially those with permissive licenses that allow commercial use. In much the same way as the dataflow paradigm and containerization are now well understood to be very useful in bioinformatics applications, we will continue to see innovations of tools and utilities for other purposes, like big data technologies, interoperability, and provenance

Verifying Workflow Models with Data Values - a Case Study of SMR Spectrum Auctions

Industry takes a great interest in verification techniques to improve the reliability of process designs. Providing reliable design in application domains like spectrum auctions is crucial. Spectrum auction revenue is considered as one of the principal sources for governmental income. Hence, analyzing the auction design before applying it can ensure absence of undesirable results of an auction. Those results might even be bad, if they occur with a probability of just higher than zero. Current verification approaches are mainly devoted to verify control ows only, although data values play a significant role in real life applications. Thus, these approaches are not sufficient to support data-centered work ows as spectrum auctions. We address this issue by providing a new data-centered verification approach to analyze Simultaneous Multi-Round (SMR) auction design in BPMN format. We show how to enhance a BPMN model by including important information, namely data values used in the work ow, which the standard BPMN 2.0 does not support. An example of a data value in a SMR auction is the "auctioneer\u27s revenue". To enable the verification of data-centered properties, we have developed a transformation of a data-value enhanced BPMN model to Petri Nets respecting the semantics of certain data value usages. For that, we support dynamic and correlated data values. By employing a model checker and defining data-centered properties in CTL formula, we verify SMR auction models to find undesirable executions for auctioneers. For example, we can precisely detect the worst values of three important measures in auctions: efficiency, revenue, and bidder\u27s profit. With it, we can not only find the undesirable outcomes, but also provide a counter-example to help an auctioneer to improve the auction design

Identification and resolution of anomalies in process models using patterns

Modeliranje procesa i metodološka istraživanja modeliranja funkcionalnosti (funkcija, procesa, aktivnosti, operacija, itd.) provode se od početaka razvoja i primjene računala. Pritom su predmet interesa metode i tehnike modeliranja, ali i anomalije modela te njihovo otkrivanje i otklanjanje. Suvremene servisno orijentirane arhitekture, razvoj vođen transformacijom modela i općenito težnja prema automatiziranom razvoju, daju novu važnost istraživanjima anomalija modela procesa i drugih modela funkcionalnosti. Rad se bavi istraživanjem anomalija u modelima procesa, njihovim osobinama, zajedničkim obilježjima, podjelom, metodama i metodikama prepoznavanja, te rješavanja uz primjenu uzoraka. Temeljni pristup otkrivanja i rješavanja anomalija u radu je formiranje taksonomije anomalija, te opis njihovih svojstava i uzoraka. Namjera je da se za svaku klasu anomalija odrede metode otkrivanja i rješavanja, s ciljem automatizacije prepoznavanja i rješavanja anomalija.Anomalies in business process models represent situations in which there is a deviation from the rules of modeling and presentation models. Anomalies are departures from the expected or normal structure, behavior, functionality, performance and etc. Since anomalies have certain common properties and characteristics by which they can be grouped and classified, we can say that the anomalies are actually patterns that cause deviations from normal behavior model and need to be cleared. A model in which exists an anomaly is defective and requires additional intervention which corrects this model. Anomalies in the models of business processes can occur during: modeling, modify models and conversion models. Problems with anomalies especially come to the fore in the case of conversion models from one notation to another. In this case, different uses of specific notation usually dictate and emphasis details on individual elements of the model. For this reason, may cause loss of information during this transformation. This paper deals with anomalies in the models of business processes, their properties, characteristics and features, by developing their taxonomy, the ways of their recognition and ways of their solution. This paper presents an overview of anomalies, which are classified according to certain characteristics. For each anomaly is given a description and example. He also suggested a way to identify and solve, in the form of OCL rules or in pseudo-code. Finally worked out a proposal automation to identify and solve anomalies based on pattern recognition, and our model is tested on several examples

Discovery and Evaluation of Coordination Patterns for Business Processes in many-to-many Relationships

Today, organisations use process-oriented systems to manage and automate the enactment of their business processes. The cornerstone artifact is the process model, which at design-time is used to describe the steps that need to be fulfilled in order to reach a business goal. At run-time, the process model is executed and process instances are created. The existing modelling approaches are based on three main paradigms: the more traditional activity-centric paradigm, the case handling paradigm and the more recent data-centric paradigm. Process models can be classified into monolithic and interacting process models. Monolithic process models are predominantly created in the activity-centric and case-handling paradigm. In a monolithic process model, all the involved resources and activities are contained in one vast model. In monolithic process models, interactions occur between the different partners involved in a cross-organisational setting which exchange messages with one another. Interacting process models are prevalent in the data-centric paradigm. In interacting process models, interdependent processes interact with one another such that on a meta-level a composite business process is achieved. In both types of models, interactions between interrelated processes need to be properly coordinated such that a common business objective can be reached. Handling the complexity generated by highly interconnected scenarios, involving hundreds of processes, is a challenge in business process management. Process management systems for such collaborations must be capable of handling both synchronous and asynchronous process interactions. In the context of process management systems, different pattern catalogues such as the Service Interaction Pattern or Correlation Pattern have been used for describing fundamental types of interactions that repeatedly arise during business process modelling. Yet, until now, none of the existing pattern catalogues has explicitly tackled the interactions of heterogeneous business processes in a many-to-many relationship setting. Furthermore, the existing pattern catalogues for the interaction-perspective are not paradigm independent, but mainly focus on the activity-centric paradigm. For modelling multiple interacting processes with different dependency constraints, a collection of patterns that explicitly describes interactions among processes in different types of relationships, in a paradigm-independent manner, is required. This thesis proposes a catalogue of patterns, named the Process Coordination Patterns, describing process interactions in a one-to-many and many-to-many relationship setting. In the developed pattern catalogue, the discovered seven patterns are illustrated by abstracting from any specific paradigm. The PCPs may be used as guidance for evaluating the degree to which existing approaches capture more complex process interactions. In this thesis, the proposed pattern catalogue is put into practice by evaluating the degree to which two modelling approaches, based on different paradigms, can support the seven Process Coordination Patterns