Verification of soundness and other properties of business processes

In this thesis we focus on improving current modeling and verification techniques for complex business processes. The objective of the thesis is to consider several aspects of real-life business processes and give specific solutions to cope with their complexity. In particular, we address verification of a proper termination property for workflows, called generalized soundness. We give a new decision procedure for generalized soundness that improves the original decision procedure. The new decision procedure reports on the decidability status of generalized soundness and returns a counterexample in case the workflow net is not generalized sound. We report on experimental results obtained with the prototype implementation we made and describe how to verify large workflows compositionally, using reduction rules. Next, we concentrate on modeling and verification of adaptive workflows — workflows that are able to change their structure at runtime, for instance when some exceptional events occur. In order to model the exception handling properly and allow structural changes of the system in a modular way, we introduce a new class of nets, called adaptive workflow nets. Adaptive workflow nets are a special type of Nets in Nets and they allow for creation, deletion and transformation of net tokens at runtime and for two types of synchronizations: synchronization on proper termination and synchronization on exception. We define some behavioral properties of adaptive workflow nets: soundness and circumspectness and employ an abstraction to reduce the verification of these properties to the verification of behavioral properties of a finite state abstraction. Further, we study how formal methods can help in understanding and designing business processes. We investigate this for the extended event-driven process chains (eEPCs), a popular industrial business process language used in the ARIS Toolset. Several semantics have been proposed for EPCs. However, most of them concentrated solely on the control flow. We argue that other aspects of business processes must also be taken into account in order to analyze eEPCs and propose a semantics that takes data and time information from eEPCs into account. Moreover, we provide a translation of eEPCs to Timed Colored Petri nets in order to facilitate verification of eEPCs. Finally, we discuss modeling issues for business processes whose behavior may depend on the previous behavior of the process, history which is recorded by workflow management systems as a log. To increase the precision of models with respect to modeling choices depending on the process history, we introduce history-dependent guards. The obtained business processes are called historydependent processes.We introduce a logic, called LogLogics for the specification of guards based on a log of a current running process and give an evaluation algorithm for such guards. Moreover, we show how these guards can be used in practice and define LogLogics patterns for properties that occur most commonly in practice

Business Process Retrieval Based on Behavioral Semantics

This paper develops a framework for retrieving business processes considering search requirements based on behavioral semantics properties; it presents a framework called "BeMantics" for retrieving business processes based on structural, linguistics, and behavioral semantics properties. The relevance of the framework is evaluated retrieving business processes from a repository, and collecting a set of relevant business processes manually issued by human judges. The "BeMantics" framework scored high precision values (0.717) but low recall values (0.558), which implies that even when the framework avoided false negatives, it prone to false positives. The highest pre- cision value was scored in the linguistic criterion showing that using semantic inference in the tasks comparison allowed to reduce around 23.6 % the number of false positives. Using semantic inference to compare tasks of business processes can improve the precision; but if the ontologies are from narrow and specific domains, they limit the semantic expressiveness obtained with ontologies from more general domains. Regarding the perform- ance, it can be improved by using a filter phase which indexes business processes taking into account behavioral semantics propertie

IUPC: Identification and Unification of Process Constraints

Business Process Compliance (BPC) has gained significant momentum in research and practice during the last years. Although many approaches address BPC, they mostly assume the existence of some kind of unified base of process constraints and focus on their verification over the business processes. However, it remains unclear how such an inte- grated process constraint base can be built up, even though this con- stitutes the essential prerequisite for all further compliance checks. In addition, the heterogeneity of process constraints has been neglected so far. Without identification and separation of process constraints from domain rules as well as unification of process constraints, the success- ful IT support of BPC will not be possible. In this technical report we introduce a unified representation framework that enables the identifica- tion of process constraints from domain rules and their later unification within a process constraint base. Separating process constraints from domain rules can lead to significant reduction of compliance checking effort. Unification enables consistency checks and optimizations as well as maintenance and evolution of the constraint base on the other side.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, technical repor

A Confirmatory Evaluation of an Educational Orientation Tool for Pre-University Students

This study incorporates the design and validation of a questionnaire for the evaluation of Careers Advisory Services and the systematic processes that influence it (family, peer groups, socioeconomic status, etc.). In addition, it examines its psychometric properties within a multicultural population of students attending educational centres in the south of Spain. It seeks to create a valid instrument that is reliable as a measurement tool and useful for evaluating decision making situations relevant to the future working context. A perspective of working life is given through consideration of the degree choices made by those involved in the decision-making process. The metrics used showed high content and construct validity. Structural equation modelling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were employed. Indicators described by Wald and Lagrange were used to examine and modify the model in order to obtain a model that best fits relevant theory and goodness of fit criteria.This research was funded by Business Consulting (ASME), grant number 08/44900 Call 2018

Quality-aware model-driven service engineering

Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Quality aspects ranging from interoperability to maintainability to performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Architecture models can substantially influence quality attributes of the implemented software systems. Besides the benefits of explicit architectures on maintainability and reuse, architectural constraints such as styles, reference architectures and architectural patterns can influence observable software properties such as performance. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and evaluating the performance of implemented software. We present an approach for addressing the quality of services and service-based systems at the model-level in the context of model-driven service engineering. The focus on architecture-level models is a consequence of the black-box character of services

Toward Semantics-aware Representation of Digital Business Processes

An extended enterprise (EE) can be described by a set of models each representing a specific aspect of the EE. Aspects can for example be the process flow or the value description. However, different models are done by different people, which may use different terminology, which prevents relating the models. Therefore, we propose a framework consisting of process flow and value aspects and in addition a static domain model with structural and relational components. Further, we outline the usage of the static domain model to enable relating the different aspects

A goal-oriented requirements modelling language for enterprise architecture

Methods for enterprise architecture, such as TOGAF, acknowledge the importance of requirements engineering in the development of enterprise architectures. Modelling support is needed to specify, document, communicate and reason about goals and requirements. Current modelling techniques for enterprise architecture focus on the products, services, processes and applications of an enterprise. In addition, techniques may be provided to describe structured requirements lists and use cases. Little support is available however for modelling the underlying motivation of enterprise architectures in terms of stakeholder concerns and the high-level goals that address these concerns. This paper describes a language that supports the modelling of this motivation. The definition of the language is based on existing work on high-level goal and requirements modelling and is aligned with an existing standard for enterprise modelling: the ArchiMate language. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how enterprise architecture can benefit from analysis techniques in the requirements domain

The Role of Kansei Engineering in Influencing Overall Satisfaction and Behavioral Intention in Service Encounters

Customers today concern themselves more on fulfilling their emotional needs rather than rationales and functionalities. In dealing with customer emotions in products/services, Kansei Engineering (KE) is applied. A comprehensive case study in luxury hotels was conducted. Eighty one Indonesian, 75 Singaporean, and 74 Japanese tourists participated in this survey. It aims to investigate the relationships among constructs during service encounter process. The finding shows that emotions (affective process) play a significant role as a complement to cognitive process in influencing customer satisfaction. Among 3 populations, Japanese was found to be more Kansei-oriented customer. Keywords: Kansei Engineering, emotional needs, customer satisfactio