A Language and Methodology based on Scenarios, Grammars and Views, for Administrative Business Processes Modelling

International audienceIn Business Process Management (BPM), process modelling has been solved in various ways. However, there are no commonly accepted modelling tools (languages). Some of them are criticized for their inability to capture both the lifecycle, informational and organizational models of processes. For some others, process modelling is generally done using a single graph; this does not facilitate modularity, maintenance and scalability. In addition, some of these languages are very general; hence, their application to specific domain processes (such as administrative processes) is very complex. In this paper, we present a new language and a new methodology, dedicated to administrative process modelling. This language is based on a variant of attributed grammars and is able to capture the lifecycle, informational and organizational models of such processes. Also, it proposes a simple graphical formalism allowing to model each process's execution scenario as an annotated tree (modularity). In the new language, a particular emphasis is put on modelling (using "views") the perceptions that actors have on processes and their data

A Grammatical Model for the Specification of Administrative Workflow Using Scenario as Modelling Unit

International audienceProcess modelling is a crucial phase of Business Process Management (BPM). Despite the many efforts made in producing process modelling tools, existing tools (languages) are not commonly accepted. They are mainly criticised for their inability to specify both the tasks making up the processes and their scheduling (their lifecycle models), the data they manipulate (their information models) and their organizational models. Process modelling in these languages often results in a single task graph; such a graph can quickly become difficult to read and maintain. Moreover, these languages are often too general (they have a very high expressiveness); this makes their application to specific types of processes complex: especially for administrative processes. In this paper, we present a new language for administrative processes modelling that allows designers to specify the lifecycle, information and organizational models of such processes using a mathematical tool based on a variant of attributed grammars. The approach imposed by the new language requires the designer to subdivide his process into scenarios, then to model each scenario individually using a simple task graph (an annotated tree) from which a grammatical model is further derived. At each moment then, the designer manipulates only a scenario of the studied process: this approach is more intuitive and modular; it allows to produce task graphs that are more refined and therefore, more readable and easier to maintain

Verification of Agent-Based Artifact Systems

Artifact systems are a novel paradigm for specifying and implementing business processes described in terms of interacting modules called artifacts. Artifacts consist of data and lifecycles, accounting respectively for the relational structure of the artifacts' states and their possible evolutions over time. In this paper we put forward artifact-centric multi-agent systems, a novel formalisation of artifact systems in the context of multi-agent systems operating on them. Differently from the usual process-based models of services, the semantics we give explicitly accounts for the data structures on which artifact systems are defined. We study the model checking problem for artifact-centric multi-agent systems against specifications written in a quantified version of temporal-epistemic logic expressing the knowledge of the agents in the exchange. We begin by noting that the problem is undecidable in general. We then identify two noteworthy restrictions, one syntactical and one semantical, that enable us to find bisimilar finite abstractions and therefore reduce the model checking problem to the instance on finite models. Under these assumptions we show that the model checking problem for these systems is EXPSPACE-complete. We then introduce artifact-centric programs, compact and declarative representations of the programs governing both the artifact system and the agents. We show that, while these in principle generate infinite-state systems, under natural conditions their verification problem can be solved on finite abstractions that can be effectively computed from the programs. Finally we exemplify the theoretical results of the paper through a mainstream procurement scenario from the artifact systems literature

Management of Data and Collaboration for Business Processes

A business process (BP) is a collection of activities and services assembled together to accomplish a business goal. Business process management (BPM) refers to the man- agement and support for a collection of inter-related business processes, which has been playing an essential role in all enterprises. Business practitioners today face enormous difficulties in managing data for BPs due to the fact that the data for BP execution is scattered across databases for enterprise, auxiliary data stores managed by the BPM sys- tems, and even file systems (e.g., definition of BP models). Moreover, current data and business process modeling approaches leave associations of persistent data in databases and data in BPs to the implementation level with little abstraction. Implementing busi- ness logic involves data access from and to database often demands high development efforts.In the current study, we conceptualize the data used in BPs by capturing all needed information for a BP throughout its execution into a “universal artifact”. The concep- tualization provides a foundation for the separation of BP execution and BP data. With the new framework, the data analysis can be carried out without knowing the logic of BPs and the modification of the BP logics can be directly applied without understanding the data structure.Even though universal artifacts provide convenient data access for processes, the data is yet stored in the underlying database and the relationship between data in artifacts and the one in database is still undefined. In general, a way to link the data of these two data sources is needed. we propose a data mapping language aiming to bridge BP data and enterprise database, so that the BP designers only need to focus on business data instead of how to manipulate data by accessing the database. We formulate syntactic conditions upon specified mapping in order that updates upon database or BP data can be properly propagated.In database area, mapping database to a view has been widely studied In recently years, data exchange method extends the notion of database views to a target database (i.e., multiple views) by using a set of conjunctive queries called “tuple generating de- pendency” (tgd). Tgd is a language that is easy to understand/specify, expressive, and decidable for a wide range of properties, which is ideal as a mapping language. Naturally, if both enterprise database and artifacts are represented as relational database, we can take advantage of data exchange technology to bridge enterprise database and artifacts by using tgd as well. Therefore, we re-visit the mapping and update propagation problem under the relational setting.In addition to the data management for a single BP, it is equivalently essential to un- derstand how messages and data should be exchanged among multiple collaborative BPs. With the introduction of artifacts, data is explicitly modeled that can be used in a collab- orative setting. Unfortunately, today’s BP collaboration languages (either orchestration or choreography) do not emphasize on how data is evolved during execution. More- over, the existing languages always assume each participant type has a single participant instance. Therefore, a declarative language is introduced to specify the collaboration among BPs with data and multiple instances concerned. The language adopts a subset of linear temporal logics (LTL) as constraints to restrict the behavior of the collaborative BPs.As a follow-up study, we focus on the satisfiability problem of the declarative BP collaboration language, i.e., whether a given specification as a set of constraints allows at least one finite execution. Naturally, if a specification excludes every possible execution, it should be considered as an undesirable design. Therefore, we consider different combi- nation of the constraint types and for each combination, syntactic conditions are provided to decide whether the given constraints are satisfiable. The syntactic conditions automat- ically lead to polynomial testing methods (comparing to PSPACE-complete complexity of general LTL satisfiability testing)

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

Stellar:A Programming Model for Developing Protocol-Compliant Agents

An interaction protocol captures the rules of encounter in a multiagent system. Development of agents that comply with protocols is a central challenge of multiagent systems. Our contribution in this chapter is a programming model, Stellar, that simplifies development of agents compliant with information protocols specified in BSPL. A significant distinction of Stellar from similar approaches is that it does not rely upon extracting control flow structures from protocol specifications to ensure compliance. Instead, Stellar provides a set of fundamental operations to programmers for producing viable messages according to the correct flow of information between agents as specified by a protocol, enabling flexible design and implementation of protocol-compliant agents. Our main contributions are: (1) identification of a set of programming errors that commonly occur when developing agents for protocol-based multiagent system, (2) definition of Stellar’s operations and a simple yet effective pattern to develop protocol-compliant agents that avoid the identified errors, and (3) demonstration of Stellar’s effectiveness by presenting concrete agents in e-commerce and insurance policy domains

Dynamic Matching of Services by Negotation

This paper presents my research project on the topic of dynamic matching of services by negotiation. The goal of the research is to develop a design theory for information systems that offer negotiation services. The result of the research will be a specification of a design framework for such systems. This framework will contain knowledge about architectural choices one has to make when designing an information system with particular properties satisfying particular requirements