Yet Another Event-driven Process Chain - Modelling Workflow Patterns with yEPCs

The 20 workflow patterns proposed by van der Aalst et al. provide a comprehensive benchmark for comparing process modelling languages. In this article, we discuss workflow pattern support of Event-Driven Process Chains (EPCs). Building on this analysis, we propose three extensions to EPCs in order to provide for workflow pattern support. These are the introduction of the so-called empty connector; inclusion of multiple instantiation concepts; and a cancellation construct. As both the latter are inspired by YAWL, we refer to this new class of EPCs as Yet Another Event-driven Process Chain (yEPC). Furthermore, we sketch how a transformation to YAWL can be used to specify the semantics of yEPCs

Mixed-Paradigm Process Modeling with Intertwined State Spaces

Business process modeling often deals with the trade-off between comprehensibility and flexibility. Many languages have been proposed to support different paradigms to tackle these characteristics. Well-known procedural, token-based languages such as Petri nets, BPMN, EPC, etc. have been used and extended to incorporate more flexible use cases, however the declarative workflow paradigm, most notably represented by the Declare framework, is still widely accepted for modeling flexible processes. A real trade-off exists between the readable, rather inflexible procedural models, and the highly-expressive but cognitively demanding declarative models containing a lot of implicit behavior. This paper investigates in detail the scenarios in which combining both approaches is useful, it provides a scoring table for Declare constructs to capture their intricacies and similarities compared to procedural ones, and offers a step-wise approach to construct mixed-paradigm models. Such models are especially useful in the case of environments with different layers of flexibility and go beyond using atomic subprocesses modeled according to either paradigm. The paper combines Petri nets and Declare to express the findings

EPC Labels and Building Features: Spatial Implications over Housing Prices

The influence of building or dwelling energy performance on the real estate market dynamics and pricing processes is deeply explored, due to the fact that energy efficiency improvement is one of the fundamental reasons for retrofitting the existing housing stock. Nevertheless, the joint effect produced by the building energy performance and the architectural, typological, and physical-technical attributes seems poorly studied. Thus, the aim of this work is to investigate the influence of both energy performance and diverse features on property prices, by performing spatial analyses on a sample of housing properties listed on Turin’s real estate market and on different sub-samples. In particular, Exploratory Spatial Data Analyses (ESDA) statistics, standard hedonic price models (Ordinary Least Squares—OLS) and Spatial Error Models (SEM) are firstly applied on the whole data sample, and then on three different sub-samples: two territorial clusters and a sub-sample representative of the most energy inefficient buildings constructed between 1946 and 1990. Results demonstrate that Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) labels are gaining power in influencing price variations, contrary to the empirical evidence that emerged in some previous studies. Furthermore, the presence of the spatial effects reveals that the impact of energy attributes changes in different sub-markets and thus has to be spatially analysed

A Survey on Process Variants Meta-modelling Approaches

This paper introduces the concept of process variants in process-aware information systems (PAIS) during the design-time phase, where multiple variants of a single process must be specified. Today's organizations have to manage multiple variants of a given process, such as multiple order processes or payment processes for a specific product or service they offer. Traditional business process management tools lack in adequately capture and represent explicitly these variants. Hence, for more than a decade an array of approaches have been proposed to tackle this gap. A reference or customizable process model has been introduced to model these variants collections in a way that each variant could be derived by inserting/removing an activity according to a process context. This survey reviews current literature by providing an overview of meta-modelling approaches that have been extended in order to capture the variations of business processes. Moreover, we give a comparative analysis of these approaches based on different criteria we identified from the inventory activity, providing insights into their strengths and limitations. This paper concludes that current approaches to process variants meta-modelling provide a comprehensive view of the conceptual level of process variants and the control-flow process perspective. While some approaches go a step further by capturing variability in resources or specialization among activities/processes

On the relevance of design knowledge for design-oriented business and information systems engineering : supplemental considerations and further application examples

This contribution represents a supplement to the article "On the Relevance of Design Knowledge for Design-Oriented Business and Information Systems Engineering — Conceptual Foundations, Application Example, and Implications" in the special issue on Science of Business and Information Systems Engineering of the journal Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) in 2010. It contains further application examples concerning the introduced reference framework for systemizing design knowledge. Besides the comprehensive documentation of design knowledge concerning eventdriven process chains (EPC) with the dedicated literary sources and an evaluation of the evidence of the provided statements, in this report the framework is furthermore applied for the documentation of design knowledge about the Process Grammar Approach, another technique for process design presented by Lee et al. in MIS Quarterly in 2008. Subsequently the results are discussed.Der vorliegende Beitrag dient als Anhang zum Artikel "On the Relevance of Design Knowledge for Design-Oriented Business and Information Systems Engineering — Conceptual Foundations, Application Example, and Implications", der in der Zeitschrift Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) zum Schwerpunktheft "Science of Business and Information Systems Engineering" im Jahr 2010 erschienen ist. Er ergänzt das dort aufgeführte Beispiel zur Anwendung des Bezugsrahmens zur Dokumentation von Gestaltungswissen. Der Bezugsrahmen wurde verwendet, um Gestaltungswissen zur Modellierungstechnik "Ereignisgesteuerte Prozesskette" (EPK) zu systematisieren, zu explizieren und hinsichtlich seiner Evidenz zu bewerten. Die dort gegebene Übersicht wird im vorliegenden Beitrag ergänzt. Darüber hinaus findet sich in diesem IWi-Heft ein weiteres Anwendungsbeispiel, das aufgrund von Platzrestriktionen im Journalartikel nicht präsentiert werden konnte. Der Bezugsrahmen dient hier der Systematisierung und Dokumentation von Gestaltungswissen zur Technik des Process Grammar Approach, der von Lee et al. 2008 im Journal MIS Quarterly präsentiert wurde. Weiterhin werden die erhobenen Ergebnisse im vorliegenden Beitrag diskutiert

A review of the Energy Productivity Center's Least-Cost Energy Strategy study

The Mellon Institute's Energy Productivity Center (EPC) has recently completed a study asking the question, "How would the nation have provided energy services in 1978 if its capital stock had een reconfigured to be optimal for actual 1978 energy prices?" Interest in this question is motivated by the unanticipated increases in oil prices since 1973. If policy makers are to learn from history it is important to know what would have happened if the increases in energy prices had been foreseen and if the nation had taken full advantage of that knowledge to minimize costs.EPC concludes that if the 1978 capital stock had been transformed in conformance with a least-cost principal for providing energy services, then, given actual 1978 energy prices and energy service demands, per capita energy service costs would have been reduced by 17%. Market shares of the various energy types would also have been affected substantially. For example, while the gas share of total energy service demand would have increased slightly from actual 1978 levels, the share of purchased electricity would have fallen from 30% to 17% of total energy service demand, and improvements in energy efficiency would have increased from 10% to 32%.EPC's findings have received considerable attention, both from the press and from policy makers. EPC interprets its results as indicating "... the direction in which we coul move to begin realizing some of the benefits of a least-cost strategy." The purpose of this report is to assess and evaluate the EPC methodology, data base, and results. Here we briefly summarize our principal findings

Stylized Facts as an Instrument for Literature Review and Cumulative Information Systems Research

The accumulation of scientific knowledge is an important objective of information systems (IS) research. Although different review approaches exist in the continuum between narrative reviews and meta-analyses, most reviews in IS are narrative or descriptive—with all related drawbacks concerning objectivity and reliability—because available under¬lying sources in IS do typically not fulfil the requirements of formal approaches such as meta-analyses. To discuss how cumulative IS research can be effectively advanced using a more formalized approach fitting the current situation in IS research, in this paper, we point out the potential of stylized facts (SFs). SFs are interesting, sometimes counterintuitive patterns in empirical data that focus on the most relevant aspects of observable phenomena by abstracting from details (stylization). SFs originate from the field of economics and have been successfully used in different fields of research for years. In this paper, we discuss their potential and challenges for literature reviews in IS. We supplement our argumentation with an application example reporting our experience with SFs. Because SFs show considerable potential for cumulative research, they seem to be a promising instrument for literature reviews and especially for theory development in IS