An agile business process and practice meta-model

Business Process Management (BPM) encompasses the discovery, modelling, monitoring, analysis and improvement of business processes. Limitations of traditional BPM approaches in addressing changes in business requirements have resulted in a number of agile BPM approaches that seek to accelerate the redesign of business process models. Meta-models are a key BPM feature that reduce the ambiguity of business process models. This paper describes a meta-model supporting the agile version of the Business Process and Practice Alignment Methodology (BPPAM) for business process improvement, which captures process information from actual work practices. The ability of the meta-model to achieve business process agility is discussed and compared with other agile meta-models, based on definitions of business process flexibility and agility found in the literature. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity). Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa

Designing a product service system in a social framework: methodological and ethical considerations

Macroscopic social and economic changes in the last few years are forcing business companies and public institutions to redefine their approach to social intervention, focusing on local and highly individualised solutions. This change is also calling for a new design approach. The challenge for designers is not only to be able to provide local and highly individualised solutions, but also to propose strategies to transfer and reproduce the solutions, or part of them, into different local contexts, thus creating economy of scope. This would be possible by using forms of codification and modularisation of the most relevant components in local solutions. The code refers to the organisational knowledge included in local components and the way each component interacts with the others. Like software systems, local product-service systems can be built upon a source code. This paper will illustrate how this process was developed in a concrete case. Through this case the authors analyse the possibility to build something similar to a source code for initiatives based on social interaction and investigate the process of construction of such a code Furthermore, the author discuss differences and analogies between design intervention in a social context and in the normal business context. The question of codification suggests a methodological approach for supporting transferability both in the problem space (dealing with complexity) and in the solution space (dealing with contingency). The analysis of differences and similarities between business- and socially-oriented processes suggests a new role for designers and new opportunities for innovation. Keywords: Product Service Systems, Methodology, Design and Morality, Codification, Transferability</p

Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

A Process Modelling Framework Based on Point Interval Temporal Logic with an Application to Modelling Patient Flows

This thesis considers an application of a temporal theory to describe and model the patient journey in the hospital accident and emergency (A&E) department. The aim is to introduce a generic but dynamic method applied to any setting, including healthcare. Constructing a consistent process model can be instrumental in streamlining healthcare issues. Current process modelling techniques used in healthcare such as flowcharts, unified modelling language activity diagram (UML AD), and business process modelling notation (BPMN) are intuitive and imprecise. They cannot fully capture the complexities of the types of activities and the full extent of temporal constraints to an extent where one could reason about the flows. Formal approaches such as Petri have also been reviewed to investigate their applicability to the healthcare domain to model processes. Additionally, to schedule patient flows, current modelling standards do not offer any formal mechanism, so healthcare relies on critical path method (CPM) and program evaluation review technique (PERT), that also have limitations, i.e. finish-start barrier. It is imperative to specify the temporal constraints between the start and/or end of a process, e.g., the beginning of a process A precedes the start (or end) of a process B. However, these approaches failed to provide us with a mechanism for handling these temporal situations. If provided, a formal representation can assist in effective knowledge representation and quality enhancement concerning a process. Also, it would help in uncovering complexities of a system and assist in modelling it in a consistent way which is not possible with the existing modelling techniques. The above issues are addressed in this thesis by proposing a framework that would provide a knowledge base to model patient flows for accurate representation based on point interval temporal logic (PITL) that treats point and interval as primitives. These objects would constitute the knowledge base for the formal description of a system. With the aid of the inference mechanism of the temporal theory presented here, exhaustive temporal constraints derived from the proposed axiomatic system’ components serves as a knowledge base. The proposed methodological framework would adopt a model-theoretic approach in which a theory is developed and considered as a model while the corresponding instance is considered as its application. Using this approach would assist in identifying core components of the system and their precise operation representing a real-life domain deemed suitable to the process modelling issues specified in this thesis. Thus, I have evaluated the modelling standards for their most-used terminologies and constructs to identify their key components. It will also assist in the generalisation of the critical terms (of process modelling standards) based on their ontology. A set of generalised terms proposed would serve as an enumeration of the theory and subsume the core modelling elements of the process modelling standards. The catalogue presents a knowledge base for the business and healthcare domains, and its components are formally defined (semantics). Furthermore, a resolution theorem-proof is used to show the structural features of the theory (model) to establish it is sound and complete. After establishing that the theory is sound and complete, the next step is to provide the instantiation of the theory. This is achieved by mapping the core components of the theory to their corresponding instances. Additionally, a formal graphical tool termed as point graph (PG) is used to visualise the cases of the proposed axiomatic system. PG facilitates in modelling, and scheduling patient flows and enables analysing existing models for possible inaccuracies and inconsistencies supported by a reasoning mechanism based on PITL. Following that, a transformation is developed to map the core modelling components of the standards into the extended PG (PG*) based on the semantics presented by the axiomatic system. A real-life case (from the King’s College hospital accident and emergency (A&E) department’s trauma patient pathway) is considered to validate the framework. It is divided into three patient flows to depict the journey of a patient with significant trauma, arriving at A&E, undergoing a procedure and subsequently discharged. Their staff relied upon the UML-AD and BPMN to model the patient flows. An evaluation of their representation is presented to show the shortfalls of the modelling standards to model patient flows. The last step is to model these patient flows using the developed approach, which is supported by enhanced reasoning and scheduling

Dynamic integration of context model constraints in web service processes

Autonomic Web service composition has been a challenging topic for some years. The context in which composition takes places determines essential aspects. A context model can provide meaningful composition information for services process composition. An ontology-based approach for context information integration is the basis of a constraint approach to dynamically integrate context validation into service processes. The dynamic integration of context constraints into an orchestrated service process is a necessary direction to achieve autonomic service composition

Towards a dynamic rule-based business process

IJWGS is now included in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), starting from volume 4, 2008. The first impact factor, which will be for 2010, is expected to be published in mid 201

Neurons and symbols: a manifesto

We discuss the purpose of neural-symbolic integration including its principles, mechanisms and applications. We outline a cognitive computational model for neural-symbolic integration, position the model in the broader context of multi-agent systems, machine learning and automated reasoning, and list some of the challenges for the area of neural-symbolic computation to achieve the promise of effective integration of robust learning and expressive reasoning under uncertainty