AMFIBIA: A Meta-Model for the Integration of Business Process Modelling Aspects

Today, there are many different formalisms and notations for modelling business processes. Though most of the formalisms have their justification, the plethora of notations makes it hard to compare and to exchange business process models among different tools. AMFIBIA (A Meta-model For the Integration of BusIness process modelling Aspects) sets out to capture the basic aspects of business process models and to define their concepts independently from a particular formalism and notation, and then map different formalisms to these basic concepts. This way, business process models can be compared with each other, and it will be even possible, to integrate and combine different formalisms in a single workflow engine. Currently, we implement a prototype of a workflow engine, which supports the concepts of AMFIBIA. Since the development of AMFIBIA started quite late in the history of workflow management, it might not have strong impact on existing workflow management systems. The concepts of AMFIBIA, however, should be applicable to SOA, were formalism independence is even more important. The talk presents the ideas and concepts of AMFIBIA and intends to trigger a discussion on the aspects of SOA and the aspects and concepts that need to me captured in SOA

Mapping business processes models from Petri nets into event-driven process chains

Business Process Reuse is an important phase in the Business Process life-cycle that for some reason has not attracted enough attention. To support the reuse phase we are building a software infrastructure called the Process Assembler. Process reuse involves many steps. In the paper we briefly discuss all of them, but then focus only on the mapping from one process definition language (which is Petri Nets) into another (Event-driven Process Chains). We build the mapping algorithm and support it by software, which is the core of the Mapper component of a system that is currently under construction. An example demonstrating the work of the algorithm is also provided

Yet Another Event-driven Process Chain - Modelling Workflow Patterns with yEPCs

The 20 workflow patterns proposed by van der Aalst et al. provide a comprehensive benchmark for comparing process modelling languages. In this article, we discuss workflow pattern support of Event-Driven Process Chains (EPCs). Building on this analysis, we propose three extensions to EPCs in order to provide for workflow pattern support. These are the introduction of the so-called empty connector; inclusion of multiple instantiation concepts; and a cancellation construct. As both the latter are inspired by YAWL, we refer to this new class of EPCs as Yet Another Event-driven Process Chain (yEPC). Furthermore, we sketch how a transformation to YAWL can be used to specify the semantics of yEPCs

Supporting effective unexpected exception handling in workflow management systems within organizaional contexts

Tese de doutoramento em Informática (Engenharia Informática), apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa através da Faculdade de Ciências, 2008Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) support the execution of organizational processes within organizations. Processes are modelled using high level languages specifying the sequence of tasks the organization has to perform. However, organizational processes do not have always a smooth flow conforming to any possible designed model and exceptions to the rule happen often. Organizations require flexibility to react to situations not predicted in the model. The required flexibility should be complemented with robustness to guarantee system reliability even in extreme situations. In our work, we have introduced the concept of WfMS resilience that comprises these two facets: robustness and flexibility. The main objective of our work is to increase resilience in WfMSs. From the events demanding for WfMS resilience, we focused on ad hoc effective unexpected exceptions as those for which no previous knowledge exist is the organization to derive the handling procedure and no plan can be a priori established. These exceptions usually require human intervention and problem solving activities, since the concrete situation may not be entirely understood before humans start reacting to the event. After discussing existing approaches to increase WfMS resilience, we have identified five levels of conformity. The fifth level, being the most demanding one, requires unrestricted humanistic interventions to workflow execution. In this thesis, we propose a system to support unrestricted users' interventions to the WfMS and we characterize the interventions as unstructured activities. The system has two modes of operation: it usually works under model control and changes to unstructured activities support when an exception is detected. The exception handling activities are carried out until the system is placed back into a coherent mode, where work may proceed undermodel execution control