Proposal for an Object Oriented Process Modeling Language

Processes are very important for the success within many business fields. They define the proper application of methods, technologies and company structures in order to reach business goals. Not only manufacturing processes have to be defined from the start point to their end, also other processes like product development processes need a proper description to gain success. For example in automotive industries complex product development processes are necessary and defined prior to product development. Over the last decades several product modeling languages have been developed moving to object oriented modeling languages, such as UML, but the used process modeling languages are still procedural. The paradigm shift caused by object oriented description within product modeling languages has to be transferred to process modeling languages. This paper introduces an object oriented approach for process modeling. Using UML as a starting point an object oriented process modeling method is differentiated. The basic concepts which are needed for process modeling are put into an object oriented context and are explained. The paper also deals with the most important methods behind object oriented process modeling and gives an outlook, what can be achieved by this approach

Towards Schema Evolution in Object-aware Process Management Systems

Enterprises want to improve the lifecycle support for their businesses processes by modeling, enacting and monitoring them based on process management systems (PrMS). Since business processes tend to change over time, process evolution support is needed. While process evolution is well understood in traditional activity-centric PrMS, it has been neglected in object-aware PrMS so far. Due to the tight integration of processes and data, in particular, changes of the data and process schemes must be handled in an integrated way; i.e., the evolution of the data schema might affect the process schema and vice versa. This paper presents our overall vision on the controlled evolution of object-aware processes. Further, it discusses fundamental requirements for enabling the evolution of object-aware process schemas in PHILharmonicFlows, a framework targeting at comprehensive support of object-aware processes

Knowledge-Intensive Processes: Characteristics, Requirements and Analysis of Contemporary Approaches

Engineering of knowledge-intensive processes (KiPs) is far from being mastered, since they are genuinely knowledge- and data-centric, and require substantial flexibility, at both design- and run-time. In this work, starting from a scientific literature analysis in the area of KiPs and from three real-world domains and application scenarios, we provide a precise characterization of KiPs. Furthermore, we devise some general requirements related to KiPs management and execution. Such requirements contribute to the definition of an evaluation framework to assess current system support for KiPs. To this end, we present a critical analysis on a number of existing process-oriented approaches by discussing their efficacy against the requirements

A Semantic-based framework for discovering business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modeling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. This paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework synthesizes the idea from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Data in Business Process Models. A Preliminary Empirical Study

Traditional activity-centric process modeling languages treat data as simple black boxes acting as input or output for activities. Many alternate and emerging process modeling paradigms, such as case handling and artifact-centric process modeling, give data a more central role. This is achieved by introducing lifecycles and states for data objects, which is beneficial when modeling data-or knowledge-intensive processes. We assume that traditional activity-centric process modeling languages lack the capabilities to adequately capture the complexity of such processes. To verify this assumption we conducted an online interview among BPM experts. The results not only allow us to identify various profiles of persons modeling business processes, but also the problems that exist in contemporary modeling languages w.r.t. The modeling of business data. Overall, this preliminary empirical study confirms the necessity of data-awareness in process modeling notations in general

Modeling IoT-aware Business Processes - A State of the Art Report

This research report presents an analysis of the state of the art of modeling Internet of Things (IoT)-aware business processes. IOT links the physical world to the digital world. Traditionally, we would find information about events and processes in the physical world in the digital world entered by humans and humans using this information to control the physical world. In the IoT paradigm, the physical world is equipped with sensors and actuators to create a direct link with the digital world. Business processes are used to coordinate a complex environment including multiple actors for a common goal, typically in the context of administrative work. In the past few years, we have seen research efforts on the possibilities to model IoT- aware business processes, extending process coordination to real world entities directly. This set of research efforts is relatively small when compared to the overall research effort into the IoT and much of the work is still in the early research stage. To create a basis for a bridge between IoT and BPM, the goal of this report is to collect and analyze the state of the art of existing frameworks for modeling IoT-aware business processes.Comment: 42 page

Actor perception in business use case modeling

Mainstream literature recognizes the validity and effectiveness of use cases as a technique for gathering and capturing system requirements. Use cases represent the driver of various modern development methods, mainly of object-oriented extraction, such as the Unified Process. Although the adoption of use cases proliferated in the context of software systems development, they are not as extensively employed in business modeling . The concept of business use case is not a novelty, but only recently did it begin to re-circulate in the literature and in case tools. This paper examines the issues involved in adopting business use cases for capturing the functionality of an organization and proposes guidelines for their identification, packaging, and mapping to system use cases. The proposed guidelines are based on the principle of actor perception described in the paper. The application of this principle is exemplified with a worked example aimed at demonstrating the utility of the proposed guidelines and at clarifying the application of the principle of actor perception. The worked example is based on a series of workshops run at a major UK financial institution

Business Domain Modelling using an Integrated Framework

This paper presents an application of a “Systematic Soft Domain Driven Design Framework” as a soft systems approach to domain-driven design of information systems development. The framework combining techniques from Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), the Unified Modelling Language (UML), and an implementation pattern known as “Naked Objects”. This framework have been used in action research projects that have involved the investigation and modelling of business processes using object-oriented domain models and the implementation of software systems based on those domain models. Within this framework, Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is used as a guiding methodology to explore the problem situation and to develop the domain model using UML for the given business domain. The framework is proposed and evaluated in our previous works, and a real case study “Information Retrieval System for academic research” is used, in this paper, to show further practice and evaluation of the framework in different business domain. We argue that there are advantages from combining and using techniques from different methodologies in this way for business domain modelling. The framework is overviewed and justified as multimethodology using Mingers multimethodology ideas

A planning approach to the automated synthesis of template-based process models

The design-time specification of flexible processes can be time-consuming and error-prone, due to the high number of tasks involved and their context-dependent nature. Such processes frequently suffer from potential interference among their constituents, since resources are usually shared by the process participants and it is difficult to foresee all the potential tasks interactions in advance. Concurrent tasks may not be independent from each other (e.g., they could operate on the same data at the same time), resulting in incorrect outcomes. To tackle these issues, we propose an approach for the automated synthesis of a library of template-based process models that achieve goals in dynamic and partially specified environments. The approach is based on a declarative problem definition and partial-order planning algorithms for template generation. The resulting templates guarantee sound concurrency in the execution of their activities and are reusable in a variety of partially specified contextual environments. As running example, a disaster response scenario is given. The approach is backed by a formal model and has been tested in experiment