Managing Decision Tasks and Events in Time-Aware Business Process Models

Time-aware business process models capture processes where temporal properties and constraints have to be suitably managed to achieve proper completion. Temporal aspects also constrain how decisions are made in processes: while some constraints hold only along certain paths, decision outcomes may be restricted to satisfy temporal constraints. In this paper, we present time-aware BPMN processes and discuss how to: (i) add temporal features to process elements, by considering also the impact of events on temporal constraint management; (ii) characterize decisions based on when they are made and used within a process; (iii) specify and use two novel kinds of decisions based on how their outcomes are managed; (iv) deal with intertwined temporal and decision aspects of time-aware BPMN processes to ensure proper execution

A modular approach to the specification and management of time duration constraints in BPMN

The modeling and management of business processes deals with temporal aspects both in the inherent representation of activity coordination and in the specification of activity properties and constraints. In this paper, we address the modeling and specification of constraints related to the duration of process activities. In detail, we consider the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard and propose an approach to define re-usable duration-aware process models that make use of existing BPMN elements for representing different nuances of activity duration at design time. Moreover, we show how advanced event-handling techniques may be exploited for detecting the violation of duration constraints during the process run-time. The set of process models specified in this paper suitably captures duration constraints at different levels of abstraction, by allowing designers to specify the duration of atomic tasks and of selected process regions in a way that is conceptually and semantically BPMN-compliant. Without loss of generality, we refer to real-world clinical working environments to exemplify our approach, as their intrinsic complexity makes them a particularly challenging and rewarding application environment

Tackling Dierent Business Process Perspectives

Business Process Management (BPM) has emerged as a discipline to design, control, analyze, and optimize business operations. Conceptual models lie at the core of BPM. In particular, business process models have been taken up by organizations as a means to describe the main activities that are performed to achieve a specific business goal. Process models generally cover different perspectives that underlie separate yet interrelated representations for analyzing and presenting process information. Being primarily driven by process improvement objectives, traditional business process modeling languages focus on capturing the control flow perspective of business processes, that is, the temporal and logical coordination of activities. Such approaches are usually characterized as \u201cactivity-centric\u201d. Nowadays, activity-centric process modeling languages, such as the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard, are still the most used in practice and benefit from industrial tool support. Nevertheless, evidence shows that such process modeling languages still lack of support for modeling non-control-flow perspectives, such as the temporal, informational, and decision perspectives, among others. This thesis centres on the BPMN standard and addresses the modeling the temporal, informational, and decision perspectives of process models, with particular attention to processes enacted in healthcare domains. Despite being partially interrelated, the main contributions of this thesis may be partitioned according to the modeling perspective they concern. The temporal perspective deals with the specification, management, and formal verification of temporal constraints. In this thesis, we address the specification and run-time management of temporal constraints in BPMN, by taking advantage of process modularity and of event handling mechanisms included in the standard. Then, we propose three different mappings from BPMN to formal models, to validate the behavior of the proposed process models and to check whether they are dynamically controllable. The informational perspective represents the information entities consumed, produced or manipulated by a process. This thesis focuses on the conceptual connection between processes and data, borrowing concepts from the database domain to enable the representation of which part of a database schema is accessed by a certain process activity. This novel conceptual view is then employed to detect potential data inconsistencies arising when the same data are accessed erroneously by different process activities. The decision perspective encompasses the modeling of the decision-making related to a process, considering where decisions are made in the process and how decision outcomes affect process execution. In this thesis, we investigate the use of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard in conjunction with BPMN starting from a pattern-based approach to ease the derivation of DMN decision models from the data represented in BPMN processes. Besides, we propose a methodology that focuses on the integrated use of BPMN and DMN for modeling decision-intensive care pathways in a real-world application domain