A novel workflow management system for handling dynamic process adaptation and compliance

Modern enterprise organisations rely on dynamic processes. Generally these processes cannot be modelled once and executed repeatedly without change. Enterprise processes may evolve unpredictably according to situations that cannot always be prescribed. However, no mechanism exists to ensure an updated process does not violate any compliance requirements. Typical workflow processes may follow a process definition and execute several thousand instances using a workflow engine without any changes. This is suitable for routine business processes. However, when business processes need flexibility, adaptive features are needed. Updating processes may violate compliance requirements so automatic verification of compliance checking is necessary. The research work presented in this Thesis investigates the problem of current workflow technology in defining, managing and ensuring the specification and execution of business processes that are dynamic in nature, combined with policy standards throughout the process lifycle. The findings from the literature review and the system requirements are used to design the proposed system architecture. Since a two-tier reference process model is not sufficient as a basis for the reference model for an adaptive and compliance workflow management system, a three-tier process model is proposed. The major components of the architecture consist of process models, business rules and plugin modules. This architecture exhibits the concept of user adaptation with structural checks and dynamic adaptation with data-driven checks. A research prototype - Adaptive and Compliance Workflow Management System (ACWfMS) - was developed based on the proposed system architecture to implement core services of the system for testing and evaluation purposes. The ACWfMS enables the development of a workflow management tool to create or update the process models. It automatically validates compliance requirements and, in the case of violations, visual feedback is presented to the user. In addition, the architecture facilitates process migration to manage specific instances with modified definitions. A case study based on the postgraduate research process domain is discussed

Integrated Modelling of Business Process Models and Business Rules: A Research Agenda

Process models are the basis for a wide range of critical activities within an organisation. It is not surprising then that process models, and the act of process modelling, have been the focus of much research over the last two decades. Recent research indicates, however, that common process modelling notations lack sufficient representation for capturing business rules. Although the need for business processes and business rules to be modelled in an integrated manner is well established, the body of knowledge on integrated modelling of the two is limited. In this paper our aim is to review the state of related research and develop a research agenda, based on a systematic review of related literature, to advance research in this field. We present a consolidated view of the benefits of rule and process model integration, together with an overview of current related approaches, and a research agenda going forward

Effect of Linked Rules on Business Process Model Understanding

Business process models are widely used in organizations by information systems analysts to represent complex business requirements and by business users to understand business operations and constraints. This understanding is extracted from graphical process models as well as business rules. Prior research advocated integrating business rules into business process models to improve the effectiveness of important organizational activities, such as developing shared understanding, effective communication, and process improvement. However, whether such integrated modeling can improve the understanding of business processes has not been empirically evaluated. In this paper, we report on an experiment that investigates the effect of linked rules, a specific rule integration approach, on business process model understanding. Our results indicate that linked rules are associated with better time efficiency in interpreting business operations, less mental effort, and partially associated with improved accuracy of understanding

A hybrid approach for aspect-oriented business process modeling

Separation of concerns has long been an important strategy to deal with complexity when developing a system. Some concerns (like security) are scattered through the whole system, and different modules are tangled to such concerns. These concerns are known as cross-cutting concerns. When the system in question is a business process, cross-cutting concerns are aimed at being encapsulated by Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling. However, the state-of-the-art techniques in this field lack efficient mechanisms that (1) support composition of cross-cutting concerns that can be defined in parallel to (a part of) a process model and (2) enable specifying both mandatory and optional cross-cutting concerns. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a new Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling approach. The approach is hybrid since it is based on declarative rules to relate imperative cross-cutting concerns and imperative business process models. The approach is explained, formally grounded with precise semantics, and used accordingly to implement the artifacts that support modeling and enactment of business processes in the proposed fashion as a proof of concept. In addition, the approach is evaluated on the basis of the Technology Acceptance Model during a workshop session. The result shows that participants perceived the approach usable and easy to use

Quality of (Digital) Services in e-Government

Internet growth in the nineties supported government ambition to provide better services to citizens through the development of Information and Communication Technologies based solutions. Thanks to the Lisbon conference, which in 2000 covered and investigated this topic, e-government has been recognized as one of the major priorities in Public Administration innovation process. As a matter of\ud fact in the last 10 years the number of services provided to citizens through Information and Communication Technologies has increased rapidly. Nevertheless the increasing rate, the access and usage of digital services do not follow the same trend. Nowadays Public Administrations deliver many electronic services which\ud are seldom used by citizens. Different reasons contribute to the highlighted situation.\ud The main assumption of the thesis is that quality of e-government digital services strongly affects real access to services by citizens. According to the complexity of quality in e-government, one of the main challenges was to define a suitable quality model. To reach such aim, domain-dependent characteristics on the services delivery have been investigated. The defined model refers to citizen,\ud technology and service related quality characteristics. Correspondingly a suitable way to represent, assess, and continuously improve services quality according to\ud such domain requirements has been introduced.\ud Concerning the service related quality aspects a methodology and a tool permitting to formally and automatically assess the quality of a designed service with\ud respect to the quality model has been defined. Starting from an user friendly notation, both for service and quality requirements, the proposed methodology has\ud been implemented as an user friendly tool supported by a mapping from user friendly notations to formal language. The tool allows to verify formally via model checking, if the given service satisfies one by one the quality requirements addressed by the quality model.\ud Additionally in some case an unique view on e-government service quality is quite useful. A mathematical model provides a single value for quality starting from the assessment of all the requirements defined in the quality model. It relies on the following activities: homogeneity, interaction and grouping.\ud A set of experiments has been performed in order to validate the goodness of the work. Services already implemented in a local Public Administration has\ud been considered. Literature review and domain experts knowledge were the main drivers of this work. It proofs the goodness of the quality model, the application of formal techniques in the complex field of study such as e-government and the quality aggregation via the mathematical model.\ud This thesis introduces advance research in e-government by providing the contributions that quality oriented service delivery in Public Administration promotes services used by the citizens. Further applications of the proposed approaches could be investigated in the areas of practical benchmarking and Service Level Agreement specification

Quality of process modeling using BPMN: a model-driven approach

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia InformáticaContext: The BPMN 2.0 specification contains the rules regarding the correct usage of the language’s constructs. Practitioners have also proposed best-practices for producing better BPMN models. However, those rules are expressed in natural language, yielding sometimes ambiguous interpretation, and therefore, flaws in produced BPMN models. Objective: Ensuring the correctness of BPMN models is critical for the automation of processes. Hence, errors in the BPMN models specification should be detected and corrected at design time, since faults detected at latter stages of processes’ development can be more costly and hard to correct. So, we need to assess the quality of BPMN models in a rigorous and systematic way. Method: We follow a model-driven approach for formalization and empirical validation of BPMN well-formedness rules and BPMN measures for enhancing the quality of BPMN models. Results: The rule mining of BPMN specification, as well as recently published BPMN works, allowed the gathering of more than a hundred of BPMN well-formedness and best-practices rules. Furthermore, we derived a set of BPMN measures aiming to provide information to process modelers regarding the correctness of BPMN models. Both BPMN rules, as well as BPMN measures were empirically validated through samples of BPMN models. Limitations: This work does not cover control-flow formal properties in BPMN models, since they were extensively discussed in other process modeling research works. Conclusion: We intend to contribute for improving BPMN modeling tools, through the formalization of well-formedness rules and BPMN measures to be incorporated in those tools, in order to enhance the quality of process modeling outcomes

Abstraction, Visualization, and Evolution of Process Models

The increasing adoption of process orientation in companies and organizations has resulted in large process model collections. Each process model of such a collection may comprise dozens or hundreds of elements and captures various perspectives of a business process, i.e., organizational, functional, control, resource, or data perspective. Domain experts having only limited process modeling knowledge, however, hardly comprehend such large and complex process models. Therefore, they demand for a customized (i.e., personalized) view on business processes enabling them to optimize and evolve process models effectively. This thesis contributes the proView framework to systematically create and update process views (i.e., abstractions) on process models and business processes respectively. More precisely, process views abstract large process models by hiding or combining process information. As a result, they provide an abstracted, but personalized representation of process information to domain experts. In particular, updates of a process view are supported, which are then propagated to the related process model as well as associated process views. Thereby, up-to-dateness and consistency of all process views defined on any process model can be always ensured. Finally, proView preserves the behaviour and correctness of a process model. Process abstractions realized by views are still not sufficient to assist domain experts in comprehending and evolving process models. Thus, additional process visualizations are introduced that provide text-based, form-based, and hierarchical representations of process models. Particularly, these process visualizations allow for view-based process abstractions and updates as well. Finally, process interaction concepts are introduced enabling domain experts to create and evolve process models on touch-enabled devices. This facilitates the documentation of process models in workshops or while interviewing process participants at their workplace. Altogether, proView enables domain experts to interact with large and complex process models as well as to evolve them over time, based on process model abstractions, additional process visualizations, and process interaction concepts. The framework is implemented in a proof-ofconcept prototype and validated through experiments and case studies

Assisted Reuse of Pattern-Based Composition Knowledge for Mashup Development

First generation of the World Wide Web (WWW) enabled users to have instantaneous access to a large diversity of knowledge. Second generation of the WWW (Web 2.0) brought a fundamental change in the way people interact with and through the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 has made the World Wide Web a platform not only for communication and sharing information but also for software development (e.g., web service composition). Web mashup or mashup development is a Web2.0 development approach in which users are expected to create applications by combining multiple data sources, application logic and UI components from the web to cater for their situational application needs. However, in reality creating an even simple mashup application is a complex task that can only be managed by skilled developers. Examples of ready mashup models are one of the main sources of help for users who don't know how to design a mashup, provided that suitable examples can be found (examples that have an analogy with the modeling situation faced by the user). But also tutorials, expert colleagues or friends, and, of course, Google are typical means to find help. However, searching for help does not always lead to a success, and retrieved information is only seldom immediately usable as it is, since the retrieved pieces of information are not contextual, i.e., immediately applicable to the given modeling problem. Motivated by the development challenges faced by a naive user of existing mashup tools, in this thesis we propose toaid such users by enabling assisted reuse of pattern-based composition knowledge. In this thesis we show how it is possible to effectively assist these users in their development task with contextual, interactive recommendations of composition knowledge in the form of mashup model patterns. We study a set of recommendation algorithms with different levels of performance and describe a flexible pattern weaving approach for the one-click reuse of patterns. We prove the generality of our algorithms and approach by implementing two prototype tools for two different mashup platforms. Finally, we validate the usefulness of our assisted development approach by performing thorough empirical tests and two user studies with our prototype tools