Modeling and enacting complex data dependencies in business processes

Enacting business processes in process engines requires the coverage of control flow, resource assignments, and process data. While the first two aspects are well supported in current process engines, data dependencies need to be added and maintained manually by a process engineer. Thus, this task is error-prone and time-consuming. In this report, we address the problem of modeling processes with complex data dependencies, e.g., m:n relationships, and their automatic enactment from process models. First, we extend BPMN data objects with few annotations to allow data dependency handling as well as data instance differentiation. Second, we introduce a pattern-based approach to derive SQL queries from process models utilizing the above mentioned extensions. Therewith, we allow automatic enactment of data-aware BPMN process models. We implemented our approach for the Activiti process engine to show applicability. Keywords: Process Modeling, Data Modeling, Process Enactment, BPMN, SQ

Design-time Models for Resiliency

Resiliency in process-aware information systems is based on the availability of recovery flows and alternative data for coping with missing data. In this paper, we discuss an approach to process and information modeling to support the specification of recovery flows and alternative data. In particular, we focus on processes using sensor data from different sources. The proposed model can be adopted to specify resiliency levels of information systems, based on event-based and temporal constraints

A bottom-up process management environment dedicated to process actors

Les organisations adoptent de plus en plus les environnements de gestion des processus car ils offrent des perspectives prometteuses d'exécution en termes de flexibilité et d'efficacité. Les environnements traditionnels proposent cependant une approche descendante qui nécessite, de la part de concepteurs, l'élaboration d'un modèle avant sa mise en oeuvre par les acteurs qui le déploient tout au long du cycle d'ingénierie. En raison de cette divergence, un différentiel important est souvent constaté entre les modèles de processus et leur mise en oeuvre. De par l'absence de prise directe avec les acteurs de terrain, le niveau opérationnel des environnements de processus est trop faiblement exploité, en particulier en ingénierie des systèmes et des logiciels. Afin de faciliter l'utilisation des environnements de processus, cette thèse présente une approche ascendante mettant les acteurs du processus au coeur de la problématique. L'approche proposée autorise conjointement la modélisation et la mise en oeuvre de leurs activités quotidiennes. Dans cet objectif, notre approche s'appuie sur la description des artéfacts produits et consommés durant l'exécution d'une activité. Cette description permet à chaque acteur du processus de décrire le fragment de processus exprimant les activités dictées par son rôle. Le processus global se décompose ainsi en plusieurs fragments appartenant à différents rôles. Chaque fragment est modélisé indépendamment des autres fragments ; il peut aussi être greffé progressivement au modèle de processus initial. La modélisation des processus devient ainsi moins complexe et plus parcellaire. En outre, un fragment de processus ne modélise que l'aspect structurel des activités d'un rôle sans anticiper sur le comportement des activités ; il est moins prescriptif qu'un ordonnancement des activités de l'acteur. Un moteur de processus basé sur la production et la consommation d'artéfacts a été développé pour promulguer des activités provenant de différents fragments de processus. Ce moteur ne requiert pas de relations prédéfinies d'ordonnancement entre les activités pour les synchroniser, mais déduit leur dépendance à partir de leurs artéfacts échangés. Les dépendances sont représentées et actualisées au sein d'un graphe appelé Process Dependency Graph (PDG) qui reflète à tout instant l'état courant de l'exécution du processus. Cet environnement a été étendu afin de gérer les changements imprévus qui se produisent inévitablement lors de la mise en oeuvre des processus. Ce dispositif permet aux acteurs de signaler des changements émergents, d'analyser les impacts possibles et de notifier les personnes affectées par les modifications. En résumé, notre approche préconise de répartir les tâches d'un processus en plusieurs fragments, modélisés et adoptés séparément par les acteurs du processus. Le moteur de processus, qui s'appuie sur la disponibilité des artéfacts pour synchroniser les activités, permet d'exécuter indépendamment les fragments des processus. Il permet aussi l'exécution d'un processus partiellement défini pour lequel certains fragments seraient manquants. La vision globale de l'état d'avancement des différents acteurs concernés émerge au fur et à mesure de l'exécution des fragments. Cette nouvelle approche vise à intégrer au mieux les acteurs du processus dans le cycle de vie de la gestion des processus, ce qui rend ces systèmes plus attractifs et plus proches de leurs préoccupations.Companies increasingly adopt process management environments, which offer promising perspectives for a more flexible and efficient process execution. Traditional process management environments embodies a top-down approach in which process modeling is performed by process designers and process enacting is performed by process actors. Due to this separation, there is often a gap between process models and their real enactments. As a consequence, the operational level of top down process environments has stayed low, especially in system and software industry, because they are not directly relevant to process actors' needs. In order to facilitate the usage of process environments for process actors, this thesis presents a user-centric and bottom-up approach that enables integration of process actors into process management life cycle by allowing them to perform both the modeling and enacting of their real processes. To this end, first, a bottom-up approach based on the artifact-centric modeling paradigm was proposed to allow each process actor to easily describe the process fragment containing the activities carried out by his role. The global process is thus decomposed into several fragments belonging to different roles. Each fragment can be modeled independently of other fragments and can be added progressively to the process model; therefore the process modeling becomes less complex and more partial. Moreover, a process fragment models only the structural aspect of a role's activities without anticipating the behavior of these activities; therefore the process model is less prescriptive. Second, a data-driven process engine was developed to enact activities coming from different process fragments. Our process engine does not require predefined work-sequence relations among these activities to synchronize them, but deduces such dependencies from their enactment-time exchanged artifacts. We used a graph structure name Process Dependency Graph (PDG) to store enactment-time process information and establish the dependencies among process elements. Third, we extend our process environment in order to handle unforeseen changes occurring during process enactment. This results in a Change-Aware Process Environment that allows process actors reporting emergent changes, analyzing possible impacts and notifying people affected by the changes. In our bottom-up approach, a process is split into several fragments separately modeled and enacted by process actors. Our data-driven process engine, which uses the availability of working artifacts to synchronize activities, enables enacting independently process fragments, and even a partially modeled process where some fragments are missing. The global process progressively emerges only at enactment time from the execution of process fragments. This new approach, with its simpler modeling and more flexible enactment, integrates better process actors into process management life cycle, and hence makes process management systems more attractive and useful for them

Context-aware Process Management for the Software Engineering Domain

Historically, software development projects are challenged with problems concerning budgets, deadlines and the quality of the produced software. Such problems have various causes like the high number of unplanned activities and the operational dynamics present in this domain. Most activities are knowledge-intensive and require collaboration of various actors. Additionally, the produced software is intangible and therefore difficult to measure. Thus, software producers are often insufficiently aware of the state of their source code, while suitable software quality measures are often applied too late in the project lifecycle, if at all. Software development processes are used by the majority of software companies to ensure the quality and reproducibility of their development endeavors. Typically, these processes are abstractly defined utilizing process models. However, they still need to be interpreted by individuals and be manually executed, resulting in governance and compliance issues. The environment is sufficiently dynamic that unforeseen situations can occur due to various events, leading to potential aberrations and process governance issues. Furthermore, as process models are implemented manually without automation support, they impose additional work for the executing humans. Their advantages often remain hidden as aligning the planned process with reality is cumbersome. In response to these problems, this thesis contributes the Context-aware Process Management (CPM) framework. The latter enables holistic and automated support for software engineering projects and their processes. In particular, it provides concepts for extending process management technology to support software engineering process models in their entirety. Furthermore, CPM contributes an approach to integrate the enactment of the process models better with the real-world process by introducing a set of contextual extensions. Various events occurring in the course of the projects can be utilized to improve process support and activities outside the realm of the process models can be covered. That way, the continuously growing divide between the plan and reality that often occurs in software engineering projects can be avoided. Finally, the CPM framework comprises facilities to better connect the software engineering process with other important aspects and areas of software engineering projects. This includes automated process-oriented support for software quality management or software engineering knowledge management. The CPM framework has been validated by a prototypical implementation, various sophisticated scenarios, and its practical application at two software companies

Towards Schema Evolution in Object-aware Process Management Systems

Enterprises want to improve the lifecycle support for their businesses processes by modeling, enacting and monitoring them based on process management systems (PrMS). Since business processes tend to change over time, process evolution support is needed. While process evolution is well understood in traditional activity-centric PrMS, it has been neglected in object-aware PrMS so far. Due to the tight integration of processes and data, in particular, changes of the data and process schemes must be handled in an integrated way; i.e., the evolution of the data schema might affect the process schema and vice versa. This paper presents our overall vision on the controlled evolution of object-aware processes. Further, it discusses fundamental requirements for enabling the evolution of object-aware process schemas in PHILharmonicFlows, a framework targeting at comprehensive support of object-aware processes

Using the guard-stage-milestone notation for monitoring BPMN-based processes

Business processes are usually designed by means of imperative languages to model the acceptable execution of the activities performed within a system or an organization. At the same time, declarative languages are better suited to check the conformance of the states and transitions of the modeled process with respect to its actual execution. To avoid defining models twice from scratch to cope with both the process enactment and its monitoring, this paper proposes an approach for translating BPMN process models to E-GSM ones: an extension of the Guard-Stage-Milestone artifact-centric notation. The paper also shows how a monitoring engine based on E-GSM specifications can detect anomalies during the execution of the process and classify them according to different levels of severity, that is, with respect to the impact on the outcome of the process

Guiding the Creation of Choreographed Processes with Multiple Instances Based on Data Models

Choreography in business processes is used as a mechanism to communicate various organizations, by providing a method to isolate the behaviour of each part and keeping the privacy of their data. Nev ertheless, choreography diagrams can also be necessary inside an orga nization when a single instance of a process needs to interact and be synchronized with multiple instances of another process simultaneously. The description, by business experts, and the implementation, by devel opers, of these choreographed models are highly complex, especially when the activities involved in the processes exchange various data objects and with different cardinalities. We propose the automatic detection of the synchronization points, when a choreographed process model is needed. The choreography will be derived from the analysis of the process model, data objects consumed and generated through the process, and the data conceptual model that relates the data objects. A graphical tool has been developed to support where the synchronization points must be included, helping to decide about the patterns that describe how a single model can be transformed into a choreographed model.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2015-63502-C3-2-