Measurements, Models, Systems and Design

531 s.

Correctness of services and their composition

We study correctness of services and their composition and investigate how the design of correct service compositions can be systematically supported. We thereby focus on the communication protocol of the service and approach these questions using formal methods and make contributions to three scenarios of SOC.Wir studieren die Korrektheit von Services und Servicekompositionen und untersuchen, wie der Entwurf von korrekten Servicekompositionen systematisch unterstützt werden kann. Wir legen dabei den Fokus auf das Kommunikationsprotokoll der Services. Mithilfe von formalen Methoden tragen wir zu drei Szenarien von SOC bei

Correctness of services and their composition

We study correctness of services and their composition and investigate how the design of correct service compositions can be systematically supported. We thereby focus on the communication protocol of the service and approach these questions using formal methods and make contributions to three scenarios of SOC.Wir studieren die Korrektheit von Services und Servicekompositionen und untersuchen, wie der Entwurf von korrekten Servicekompositionen systematisch unterstützt werden kann. Wir legen dabei den Fokus auf das Kommunikationsprotokoll der Services. Mithilfe von formalen Methoden tragen wir zu drei Szenarien von SOC bei

An overview of decision table literature 1982-1995.

This report gives an overview of the literature on decision tables over the past 15 years. As much as possible, for each reference, an author supplied abstract, a number of keywords and a classification are provided. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. The literature is classified according to application area, theoretical versus practical character, year of publication, country or origin (not necessarily country of publication) and the language of the document. After a description of the scope of the interview, classification results and the classification by topic are presented. The main body of the paper is the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.

Leveraging Anomaly Detection in Business Process with Data Stream Mining

Identifying fraudulent or anomalous business procedures is today a key challenge for organisations of any dimension. Nonetheless, the continuous nature of business activities conveys to the continuous acquisition of data in support of business process monitoring. In light of this, we propose a method for online anomaly detection in business processes. From a stream of events, our approach extract cases descriptors and applies a density-based clustering technique to detect outliers. We applied our method to a real-life dataset, and we used streaming clustering measures for evaluating performances. Exploring different combinations of parameters, we obtained promising performance metrics, showing that our method is capable of finding anomalous process instances in a vast complexity of scenarios

Linguistic Refactoring of Business Process Models

In the past decades, organizations had to face numerous challenges due to intensifying globalization and internationalization, shorter innovation cycles and growing IT support for business. Business process management is seen as a comprehensive approach to align business strategy, organization, controlling, and business activities to react flexibly to market changes. For this purpose, business process models are increasingly utilized to document and redesign relevant parts of the organization's business operations. Since companies tend to have a growing number of business process models stored in a process model repository, analysis techniques are required that assess the quality of these process models in an automatic fashion. While available techniques can easily check the formal content of a process model, there are only a few techniques available that analyze the natural language content of a process model. Therefore, techniques are required that address linguistic issues caused by the actual use of natural language. In order to close this gap, this doctoral thesis explicitly targets inconsistencies caused by natural language and investigates the potential of automatically detecting and resolving them under a linguistic perspective. In particular, this doctoral thesis provides the following contributions. First, it defines a classification framework that structures existing work on process model analysis and refactoring. Second, it introduces the notion of atomicity, which implements a strict consistency condition between the formal content and the textual content of a process model. Based on an explorative investigation, we reveal several reoccurring violation patterns are not compliant with the notion of atomicity. Third, this thesis proposes an automatic refactoring technique that formalizes the identified patterns to transform a non-atomic process models into an atomic one. Fourth, this thesis defines an automatic technique for detecting and refactoring synonyms and homonyms in process models, which is eventually useful to unify the terminology used in an organization. Fifth and finally, this thesis proposes a recommendation-based refactoring approach that addresses process models suffering from incompleteness and leading to several possible interpretations. The efficiency and usefulness of the proposed techniques is further evaluated by real-world process model repositories from various industries. (author's abstract

Generic Services Model for the Automatic Improvement of Business Processes

Introduction: Organizations require more productivity and efficiency in their business processes every day. Currently, various tools provide support to optimize time and resources according to the complexity of the activities of the business processes. However, by automating processes, few companies can define a successful workflow, thus failing to anticipate the difficulties in a production environment. Consequently, it is impossible to provide an early solution to problems, which implies cost overruns, loss of time, and in some cases, affectation of the organization's human talent. Objective: This article presents a generic service model for the automatic improvement of business processes that allows identifying bottlenecks, reprocesses, failures, and delays when analyzing the event logs of a business process. It also summarizes the implementation of the bottleneck management service to support decision-making in a simulated process, applying regression models to predict the performance of manual process activities based on delays and queue lengths. By predicting performance and making resource allocation suggestions, the level of process improvement was determined. Method: The research was conducted following the Iterative Research Pattern proposed by Pratt. First, the main problems in process management were identified, then a review of the state of the art was carried out to find out the proposed solutions to these problems. A solution model independent of the process management software used was proposed, and finally, two evaluations were carried out, one at a conceptual level with the focus group technique and the other based on the implementation of one of the proposed services and data collected from an experiment in a business process simulator. Results: The conceptual evaluation of the services proposed in the model was conducted by a group of experts, based on the design and content guidelines of the BPMN modeling nomenclature standard, giving a rating of 4.8 out of 5.0 for each service. Experimentation with the business process simulator and the recommendations provided by the implemented service (bottleneck management) made it possible to evaluate the reduction in the processing time of the instances of a process in relation to the added resources. Conclusions: The proposed model is composed of three main services, bottleneck management, resource management, and input management. The first service helps to establish the corrective measures so that the process flows and the instances of this do not get stuck in specific tasks or activities, which helps to improve the response time and the quality of the service. Resource management seeks to optimize the execution time of manual activities and input management seeks to ensure that an instance of the process has the data and documents required to be processed from start to finish, avoiding reprocessing and improving the quality of the data received and processed.Introducción: Las organizaciones requieren día a día más productividad y eficiencia en sus procesos de negocio. En la actualidad se cuenta con diversas herramientas que brindan soporte para optimizar tiempos y recursos de acuerdo con la complejidad de las actividades de los procesos de negocio. Sin embargo, al automatizar procesos, pocas empresas logran definir un flujo de trabajo exitoso, por lo que no pueden prever las dificultades que surgen en un entorno de producción. En consecuencia, no es posible dar una solución anticipada a los problemas, lo que implica sobrecostos, pérdida de tiempo y en algunos casos afectación al talento humano de la organización. Objetivo: En este artículo se presenta un modelo de servicios genérico para la mejora automática de procesos de negocio que permite identificar cuellos de botella, reprocesos, fallas y retrasos al analizar los logs de eventos de un proceso de negocio. También resume la implementación del servicio de gestión de cuellos de botella para soportar la toma de decisiones en un proceso simulado, aplicando modelos de regresión para predecir el rendimiento de las actividades manuales del proceso con base en los retrasos y la longitud de las colas. Mediante la predicción del rendimiento y la elaboración de sugerencias de asignación de recursos, se determinó el nivel de mejora del proceso. Metodología: La investigación se realizó siguiendo el Patrón de Investigación Iterativa propuesto por Pratt. Primero se identificaron los principales problemas en la gestión de procesos, luego se realizó una revisión del estado del arte para conocer las propuestas de solución a estos problemas, después se propuso un modelo de solución independiente del software de gestión de procesos que se use y finalmente se realizaron dos evaluaciones, una a nivel conceptual con la técnica de grupo focal y la otra basada en la implementación de uno de los servicios propuestos y datos recolectados de un experimento en un simulador de procesos de negocio. Resultados: La evaluación conceptual de los servicios propuestos en el modelo se realizó por parte de un grupo de expertos, con base en los lineamientos de diseño y contenido del estándar de la nomenclatura de modelado BPMN, otorgando una calificación de 4,8 sobre 5,0 para cada servicio. La experimentación con el simulador de procesos de negocio y las recomendaciones entregadas por el servicio implementado (gestión de cuellos de botella) permitió evaluar la reducción en tiempo del procesamiento de las instancias de un proceso en relación con los recursos adicionados. Conclusiones: El modelo propuesto este compuesto de tres servicios principales, la gestión de cuellos de botella, la gestión de recursos y la gestión de entradas. El primer servicio ayuda a establecer las medidas correctivas para que el proceso fluya y las instancias de este no se encolen en tareas o actividades específicas, lo que ayuda a mejorar el tiempo de respuesta y la calidad del servicio. La gestión de recursos busca optimizar el tiempo de ejecución de las actividades manuales y la gestión de entradas busca asegurar que una instancia del proceso cuente con los datos y documentos requeridos para ser procesado de inicio a fin, evitando reprocesos y mejorando la calidad de los datos que se reciben y procesan