RuleCNL: A Controlled Natural Language for Business Rule Specifications

Business rules represent the primary means by which companies define their business, perform their actions in order to reach their objectives. Thus, they need to be expressed unambiguously to avoid inconsistencies between business stakeholders and formally in order to be machine-processed. A promising solution is the use of a controlled natural language (CNL) which is a good mediator between natural and formal languages. This paper presents RuleCNL, which is a CNL for defining business rules. Its core feature is the alignment of the business rule definition with the business vocabulary which ensures traceability and consistency with the business domain. The RuleCNL tool provides editors that assist end-users in the writing process and automatic mappings into the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) standard. SBVR is grounded in first order logic and includes constructs called semantic formulations that structure the meaning of rules.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, Fourth Workshop on Controlled Natural Language (CNL 2014) Proceeding

Enterprise modelling framework for dynamic and complex business environment: socio-technical systems perspective

The modern business environment is characterised by dynamism and ambiguity. The causes include global economic change, rapid change requirements, shortened development life cycles and the increasing complexity of information technology and information systems (IT/IS). However, enterprises have been seen as socio-technical systems. The dynamic complex business environment cannot be understood without intensive modelling and simulation. Nevertheless, there is no single description of reality, which has been seen as relative to its context and point of view. Human perception is considered an important determinant for the subjectivist view of reality. Many scholars working in the socio-technical systems and enterprise modelling domains have conceived the holistic sociotechnical systems analysis and design possible using a limited number of procedural and modelling approaches. For instance, the ETHICS and Human-centred design approaches of socio-technical analysis and design, goal-oriented and process-oriented modelling of enterprise modelling perspectives, and the Zachman and DoDAF enterprise architecture frameworks all have limitations that can be improved upon, which have been significantly explained in this thesis. [Continues.

Eine Dienstleistungsbeschreibungsmethode für Dienstleistungsökosysteme - Metamodelle, Modellierungsnotationen und Modelltransformationen

Globalization and rapid technological change elevates the role of the Internet in terms of business service offering and procurement. At the same time, companies specialize on core competencies on the one hand, and on the other hand, integrate with other firms into “service ecosystems” in order to serve market needs in a flexible manner. One challenge in this setting is how to develop and describe novel business services within service ecosystems for efficient trade in services over the Internet. This work proposes a method for describing business services that integrates into business service development processes. The development of such a method leads to three major challenges: Firstly, it is necessary to determine which properties are appropriate for describing business services. This work analyzes existing approaches in the marketing, information systems, and computer science domain and develops a model for a formal description that facilitates offering and discovering of business services. Secondly, business service description elicitation, documentation, and communication must be provided for the whole business service development process. This work’s approach includes the development of an appropriate modeling notation as an extension of the Unified Modeling Notation (UML). Thirdly, there is a need for transforming business service descriptions into software realization languages that are suitable for the Internet. This contribution offers an automatic transformation of business service descriptions into Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents using model-to-model transformation scripts. The method for describing business services was evaluated by implementing an integrated modeling environment along with related transformation scripts as well as by two case studies in the insurance and IT outsourcing industry.Im Rahmen der fortschreitenden Globalisierung und des technischen Wandels spielt das Internet eine immer größere Rolle um Dienstleistungen anzubieten und zu vermitteln. Zur selben Zeit spezialisieren sich Unternehmen zunehmend auf ihre Kernkompetenzen und schließen sich in „Service Ecosystems“ zusammen, um flexibel auf den Markt reagieren zu können. Eine wichtige Fragestellung hierbei ist, wie neue Dienstleistungen innerhalb von Service Ecosystems entwickelt und beschrieben werden können um effizient über das Internet gehandelt zu werden. Hierzu schlägt die vorliegende Arbeit eine Methode zur Beschreibung von Dienstleistungen vor, die sich in Dienstleistungsentwicklungsprozesse integrieren lässt. Die Entwicklung einer solchen Methode führt zu drei Herausforderungen: Erstens muss herausgefunden werden, welche Eigenschaften sich für die Beschreibung von Dienstleistungen eignen. Diese Arbeit untersucht existierende Ansätze im Bereich Marketing, Wirtschaftsinformatik und Angewandte Informatik und erarbeitet ein Modell für eine formale Beschreibung von Dienstleistungen, welches das Anbieten und Finden von Dienstleistungen im Internet vereinfacht. Zweitens muss die Aufnahme, Dokumentation und Kommunikation von Beschreibungen über den gesamten Dienstleistungsentwicklungsprozess gewährleistet werden. Der in der Arbeit verfolgte Ansatz ist die Entwicklung einer geeigneten Modellierungsnotation als Erweiterung der Unified Modeling Language (UML). Drittens bedarf es einer Überführung der konzeptionellen Beschreibung für Dienstleistungen in Softwarerealisierungssprachen, die im Internet Anwendung finden. Der Beitrag dieser Arbeit umfasst die automatische Überführung der Dienstleistungsbeschreibung in ein Web Service Description Language (WSDL) Dokument mittels Modell-zu-Modell Transformationen. Die Methode zur Beschreibungen von Dienstleistungen wurde einerseits durch Implementierung einer integrierten Modellierungsumgebung und zugehöriger Transformationsskripte und andererseits durch zwei Fallstudien in der Versicherungs- und IT Outsourcing Branche in der Praxis evaluiert

Complexity in Translation. An English-Norwegian Study of Two Text Types

The present study discusses two primary research questions. Firstly, we have tried to investigate to what extent it is possible to compute the actual translation relation found in a selection of English-Norwegian parallel texts. By this we understand the generation of translations with no human intervention, and we assume an approach to machine translation (MT) based on linguistic knowledge. In order to answer this question, a measurement of translational complexity is applied to the parallel texts. Secondly, we have tried to find out if there is a difference in the degree of translational complexity between the two text types, law and fiction, included in the empirical material. The study is a strictly product-oriented approach to complexity in translation: it disregards aspects related to translation methods, and to the cognitive processes behind translation. What we have analysed are intersubjectively available relations between source texts and existing translations. The degree of translational complexity in a given translation task is determined by the types and amounts of information needed to solve it, as well as by the accessibility of these information sources, and the effort required when they are processed. For the purpose of measuring the complexity of the relation between a source text unit and its target correspondent, we apply a set of four correspondence types, organised in a hierarchy reflecting divisions between different linguistic levels, along with a gradual increase in the degree of translational complexity. In type 1, the least complex type, the corresponding strings are pragmatically, semantically, and syntactically equivalent, down to the level of the sequence of word forms. In type 2, source and target string are pragmatically and semantically equivalent, and equivalent with respect to syntactic functions, but there is at least one mismatch in the sequence of constituents or in the use of grammatical form words. Within type 3, source and target string are pragmatically and semantically equivalent, but there is at least one structural difference violating syntactic functional equivalence between the strings. In type 4, there is at least one linguistically non-predictable, semantic discrepancy between source and target string. The correspondence type hierarchy, ranging from 1 to 4, is characterised by an increase with respect to linguistic divergence between source and target string, an increase in the need for information and in the amount of effort required to translate, and a decrease in the extent to which there exist implications between relations of source-target equivalence at different linguistic levels. We assume that there is a translational relation between the inventories of simple and complex linguistic signs in two languages which is predictable, and hence computable, from information about source and target language systems, and about how the systems correspond. Thus, computable translations are predictable from the linguistic information coded in the source text, together with given, general information about the two languages and their interrelations. Further, we regard non-computable translations to be correspondences where it is not possible to predict the target expression from the information encoded in the source expression, together with given, general information about SL and TL and their interrelations. Non-computable translations require access to additional information sources, such as various kinds of general or task-specific extra-linguistic information, or task-specific linguistic information from the context surrounding the source expression. In our approach, correspondences of types 1–3 constitute the domain of linguistically predictable, or computable, translations, whereas type 4 correspondences belong to the non-predictable, or non-computable, domain, where semantic equivalence is not fulfilled. The empirical method involves extracting translationally corresponding strings from parallel texts, and assigning one of the types defined by the correspondence hierarchy to each recorded string pair. The analysis is applied to running text, omitting no parts of it. Thus, the distribution of the four types of translational correspondence within a set of data provides a measurement of the degree of translational complexity in the parallel texts that the data are extracted from. The complexity measurements of this study are meant to show to what extent we assume that an ideal, rule-based MT system could simulate the given translations, and for this reason the finite clause is chosen as the primary unit of analysis. The work of extracting and classifying translational correspondences is done manually as it requires a bilingually competent human analyst. In the present study, the recorded data cover about 68 000 words. They are compiled from six different text pairs: two of them are law texts, and the remaining four are fiction texts. Comparable amounts of text are included for each text type, and both directions of translation are covered. Since the scope of the investigation is limited, we cannot, on the basis of our analysis, generalise about the degree of translational complexity in the chosen text types and in the language pair English-Norwegian. Calculated in terms of string lengths, the complexity measurement across the entire collection of data shows that as little as 44,8% of all recorded string pairs are classified as computable translational correspondences, i.e. as type 1, 2, or 3, and non-computable string pairs of type 4 constitute a majority (55,2%) of the compiled data. On average, the proportion of computable correspondences is 50,2% in the law data, and 39,6% in fiction. In relation to the question whether it would be fruitful to apply automatic translation to the selected texts, we have considered the workload potentially involved in correcting machine output, and in this respect the difference in restrictedness between the two text types is relevant. Within the non-computable correspondences, the frequency of cases exhibiting only one minimal semantic deviation between source and target string is considerably higher among the data extracted from the law texts than among those recorded from fiction. For this reason we tentatively regard the investigated pairs of law texts as representing a text type where tools for automatic translation may be helpful, if the effort required by post-editing is smaller than that of manual translation. This is possibly the case in one of the law text pairs, where 60,9% of the data involve computable translation tasks. In the other pair of law texts the corresponding figure is merely 38,8%, and the potential helpfulness of automatisation would be even more strongly determined by the edit cost. That text might be a task for computer-aided translation, rather than for MT. As regards the investigated fiction texts, it is our view that post-editing of automatically generated translations would be laborious and not cost effective, even in the case of one text pair showing a relatively low degree of translational complexity. Hence, we concur with the common view that the translation of fiction is not a task for MT

A method for developing Reference Enterprise Architectures

Industrial change forces enterprises to constantly adjust their organizational structures in order to stay competitive. In this regard, research acknowledges the potential of Reference Enterprise Architectures (REA). This thesis proposes REAM - a method for developing REAs. After contrasting organizations' needs with approaches available in the current knowledge base, this work identifies the absence of method support for REA development. Proposing REAM, the author aims to close this research gap and evaluates the method's utility by applying REAM in different naturalistic settings

Emergent Behaviors in a Resilient Logistics Supply Chain

This PhD dissertation addresses vulnerabilities in logistics supply chains, such as disruptions from pandemics, natural disasters, and geopolitical tensions. It underscores the complexity of supply chains, likening them to socio-technical systems where resilience is key for managing unexpected events and thriving amidst adversity. The focus is on leveraging smart business objects—exemplified by “smart pallets” with sensing and computational capabilities—to augment real-time decision-making and resilience in supply chains. When strategically positioned within the supply network, these smart pallets can provide key insights into the movement of goods, enabling a rapid response to disruptions through real-time monitoring and predictive analytics. The dissertation investigates centralized, decentralized, and hybrid approaches to decision-making within these networks. Centralized methods ensure uniformity but may neglect local specifics, while decentralized ones offer adaptability at the risk of inconsistency. A hybrid model seeks to balance these extremes, combining broad guidelines with local autonomy for optimal resilience. This research aims to explore how such smart objects can anticipate and react to emergent behaviors, thereby augmenting supply chain resilience beyond mere performance indicators to actively managing and adapting to disruptions. Through various chapters, the dissertation offers an exploration, from designing resilient architectures and evaluating business rules in real-time to mining these rules from data and adapting them to evolving circumstances. Overall, this work presents a nuanced view of resilience in supply chains, emphasizing the adaptability of business rules, the importance of technological evolution alongside organizational practices, and the potential of integrating novel techniques such as process mining with multi-agent systems for better decision-making and operational efficiency

Investigating business process elements: a journey from the field of Business Process Management to ontological analysis, and back

Business process modelling languages (BPMLs) typically enable the representation of business processes via the creation of process models, which are constructed using the elements and graphical symbols of the BPML itself. Despite the wide literature on business process modelling languages, on the comparison between graphical components of different languages, on the development and enrichment of new and existing notations, and the numerous definitions of what a business process is, the BPM community still lacks a robust (ontological) characterisation of the elements involved in business process models and, even more importantly, of the very notion of business process. While some efforts have been done towards this direction, the majority of works in this area focuses on the analysis of the behavioural (control flow) aspects of process models only, thus neglecting other central modelling elements, such as those denoting process participants (e.g., data objects, actors), relationships among activities, goals, values, and so on. The overall purpose of this PhD thesis is to provide a systematic study of the elements that constitute a business process, based on ontological analysis, and to apply these results back to the Business Process Management field. The major contributions that were achieved in pursuing our overall purpose are: (i) a first comprehensive and systematic investigation of what constitutes a business process meta-model in literature, and a definition of what we call a literature-based business process meta-model starting from the different business process meta-models proposed in the literature; (ii) the ontological analysis of four business process elements (event, participant, relationship among activities, and goal), which were identified as missing or problematic in the literature and in the literature-based meta-model; (iii) the revision of the literature-based business process meta-model that incorporates the analysis of the four investigated business process elements - event, participant, relationship among activities and goal; and (iv) the definition and evaluation of a notation that enriches the relationships between activities by including the notions of occurrence dependences and rationales

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation