Analysing and Enhancing Business Processes and IT-Systems for Mobile Workforce Automation - A Framework Approach

Mobile B2E-applications (business-to-employee) can add significant value to a company’s business, when large workforce divisions are involved in the execution of certain business processes. From a technical point of view, the major issues are solved (e.g. solutions for connectivity, broadband mobile networks, synchronization mechanisms, secure protocols etc.). But from a business point of view there is a lack of methodology regarding the alignment of technical solutions to the business needs. As companies face a continuously faster change in business models, legal constraints and customer needs, highly flexible systems are needed to react to changing business processes. Furthemore, the introduction of new mobile systems is often a technologydriven process, pushing the alignment of software and systems to the highly specific, fast changing business needs into the background. This paper introduces a framework summarizing the findings from earlier research and case studies related to this topic. The framework consists of a general reference process for mobile work and of a model explaining influencing factors, optimization goals and their relationships for mobile processes. The framework can be applied for process modeling, simulation and optimization as well as for requirements analysis and return on investment calculations

Analysis and Optimization of Mobile Business Processes

Mobility of workers and business processes rapidly gains the attention of businesses and business analysts. A wide variety of definitions exists for mobile business processes. This work considers a type of business processes concerned with the maintenance of distributed technical equipment as, e.g., telecommunication networks, utility networks, or professional office gear. Executing the processes in question, workers travel to the location where the equipment is situated and perform tasks there. Depending on the type of activities to be performed, the workers need certain qualifications to fulfill their duty. Especially in network maintenance processes, activities are often not isolated but depend on the parallel or subsequent execution of other activities at other locations. Like every other economic activity, the out- lined mobile processes are under permanent pressure to be executed more efficiently. Since business process reengineering (BPR) projects are the common way to achieve process improvements, business analysts need methods to model and evaluate mobile business processes. Mobile processes challenge BPR projects in two ways: (i) the process at- tributes introduced by mobility (traveling, remote synchronization, etc.) complicate process modeling, and (ii) these attributes introduce process dynamics that prevent the straightforward prediction of BPR effects. This work solves these problems by developing a modeling method for mobile processes. The method allows for simulating mobile processes considering the mobility attributes while hiding the complexity of these attributes from the business analysts modeling the processes. Simulating business processes requires to assign activites to workers, which is called scheduling. The spatial distribution of activities relates scheduling to routing problems known from the logistics domain. To provide the simula- tor with scheduling capabilities the according Mobile Workforce Scheduling Problem with Multitask-Processes (MWSP-MP) is introduced and analyzed in-depth. A set of neighborhood operators was developed to allow for the application of heuristics and meta-heuristics to the problem. Furthermore, methods for generating start solutions of the MWSP-MP are introduced. The methods introduced throughout this work were validated with real-world data from a German utility. The contributions of this work are a reference model of mobile work, a business domain independent modeling method for mobile business processes, a simulation environment for such processes, and the introduction and analysis of the Mobile Workforce Scheduling Problem with Multitask-Processes

An Analysis Framework for Mobile Workforce Automation

In this paper we introduce an analysis framework for mobile workforce automation. The framework is based on the findings from earlier research as well as on an analysis of 27 recent case studies conducted within the field of mobile workforce automation. It consists of a general reference process for mobile work and of a model explaining influencing factors (worker, task, coordination system, information system), optimization goals and their relationships in mobile business processes. The framework can be applied to process modeling, simulation, and optimization as well as to requirements analysis and return on investment calculations. Based on the results of case study evaluation, it is furthermore shown, that recent mobile IT solutions are mainly built for relatively simple processes and cooperation models. Mobilizing more complex processes still seems to be a challenge

Simulating Collaborative Mobile Services – An Approach to Evaluate a New Location Enabling Service

Although enthusiasm for the “killer-application” in the mobile sector has decreased, location based services still seem to be valuable mobile services. Today’s location based services are mostly forced to use the proprietary location information provided by mobile network operators. The approach that is discussed here depicts a way of locating a mobile client independently from certain network operators and in heterogeneous networks. The Location Trader system collects and provides location information for users and providers of location based services. The accumulated interaction of each user of the user community enables to generate reliable location information in the Location Trader database. This paper prepares the groundwork for modeling the core principles of unintended value co-production with the Location Trader System. We intend to focus our analysis on the Location Trader System resp. Services, as the phenomenon of value co-production is widespread because of low coordination costs for integration and transactions enabled by immateriality and potential automation of business and transaction processes. The focus of this paper is the simulation of the user integration based on the theoretical basis

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

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

OntoEng: A design method for ontology engineering in information systems

This paper addresses the design problem relating to ontology engineering in the discipline of information systems. Ontology engineering is a realm that covers issues related to ontology development and use throughout its life span. Nowadays, ontology as a new innovation promises to improve the design, semantic integration, and utilization of information systems. Ontologies are the backbone of knowledge-based systems. In addition, they establish sharable and reusable common understanding of specific domains amongst people, information systems, and software agents. Notwithstanding, the ontology engineering literature does not provide adequate guidance on how to build, evaluate, and maintain ontologies. On the basis of the gathered experience during the development of V4 Telecoms Business Model Ontology as well as the conducted integration of the related literature from the design science paradigm, this paper introduces OntoEng and its application as a novel systematic design method for ontology engineering