Caractérisation et logique d'une situation collaborative

Initié en 2009, le projet MISE 2.0 (deuxième itération du projet Mediation Information System Engineering) s’articule autour d’une approche BPM (pour Business Process Management) et d’une vision MDE (pour Model-Driven Engineering). La réalisation d’une démarche BPM classique au sein d’une organisation nécessite de recueillir une connaissance couvrant à la fois les aspects structurel, informationnel et fonctionnel afin de définir des modèles de processus caractéristiques du comportement de l’organisation. Concernant le projet MISE 2.0, l’approche BPM considérée concerne un ensemble d’organisations collaboratives. Quant à la composante MDE, elle est destinée à faciliter l’automatisation des différentes étapes de la démarche : i) Recueil de la connaissance (caractérisation de la situation) : Il s’agit de collecter les information concernant la situation collaborative considérée, ii) Déduction de la cartographie de processus collaboratifs (définition de la solution) : il s’agit de définit les processus collaboratifs adaptés à la situation collaboratives caractérisée au niveau précedent and iii) Déploiement du SI de médiation (implémentation de la solution) : il s’agit d’implémenter le SI de médiation sous la forme d’une plateforme informatique capable d’orchestrer les processus collaboratif définis. La problématique scientifique relève des deux transitions entre ces trois niveaux d’abstractions : la première transition est prise en charge au niveau abstrait de la démarche MISE 2.0 alors que la seconde est traitée au niveau concret. Les travaux de thèse dont il est ici question se focalisent sur le niveau abstrait : déduction d’une cartographie de processus collaboratifs satisfaisant la situation collaborative considérée. Ce type d’objectif relève généralement d’activités entièrement manuelles qui nécessitent une importante quantité de travail afin d’obtenir les modèles de processus escomptés. Les travaux de recherches présentés ambitionnent d’automatiser cette démarche. Le principe est le suivant : (i) recueil, sous la forme de modèles, de la connaissance nécessaire à la caractérisation de la situation collaborative (informations sur les partenaires, les fonctions qu’ils partagent et leurs objectifs), (ii) déduction de la connaissance complémentaire relative à la dynamique collaborative qui pourrait satisfaire ces objectifs selon les moyens disponibles (cette phase s’appuie sur un métamodèle collaboratif, sur l’ontologie associée et sur des règles de transformation) et (iii) structuration de cette connaissance générée sous la forme d’une cartographie de processus collaboratifs (grâce à des algorithmes dédiés). ABSTRACT : MISE 2.0 (for Mediation Information System Engineering, second iteration) project has been launched in 2009. The MISE 2.0 engineering approach is based on BPM (Business Process Management) and MDE (Model-Driven Engineering). Running a regular BPM approach on a specific organization consists in gathering structural, informational, and functional knowledge in order to design cartography of processes covering the behavior of the modeled organization. Regarding the MISE 2.0 project the BPM approach concerns a set of organizations and MDE helps in automatizing the different steps: i) Knowledge gathering (situation layer): collect information concerning the collaborative situation, ii) Processes cartography design (solution layer): design the processes according to the knowledge gathered and iii) MIS deployment (implementation layer): implement an IT structure able to run the processes cartography. Both the transitions between these layers are the hard-points of this approach: The first gap is managed at the abstract level of MISE 2.0 while the second one is managed at the concrete level of MISE 2.0. The current PhD is focused on the first issue: designing a relevant processes cartography from the modeled collaborative situation. However, this is usually a manual activity, which requires a large amount of work to draw the processes and their links. The current research works aim at building such collaborative process cartography in an automated manner. Our principles are (i) to gather the essential and minimum initial collaborative knowledge (e.g. partners, shared functions and collaborative objectives) in models, ii) to deduce the missing knowledge with the help of a collaborative metamodel, an associated ontology and transformation rules and iii) to structure the deduced knowledge in a collaborative process cartography thanks to dedicated algorithms

Knowledge-based system for collaborative process specification

Le marché industriel est aujourd’hui de plus en plus dynamique et compétitif. Cette tendance évolutive de l’écosystème amène les entreprises à prendre part à un nombre croissant de réseaux industriels, dans l’optique de maintenir leur activité et d’accroître leur compétitivité. La qualité d’interaction et de collaboration de partenaires de ces réseaux dépend grandement de la capacité de leurs systèmes d’information (SIs) respectifs à gérer et à partager les informations. Le projet MISE (Mediation Information System Engineering) relève pleinement de cette problématique en proposant une approche de conception d’une solution (conceptuelle et technologique) pour le support de l’interopérabilité d’entreprises au travers de leurs SIs. Ce projet s’appuie sur la notion de MDE (Model-Driven Engineering) et s’articule autour de trois niveaux : métier, logique et technologique. Les travaux de thèse dont il est ici question relèvent du niveau métier en présentant une démarche d’obtention d’un modèle indépendant de toute implémentation (CIM pour Computer Independent Model). Il s’agit en particulier de s’appuyer sur un système basé sur la gestion de connaissance pour concevoir des processus collaboratifs en BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation). En se positionnant à un niveau d’abstraction au dessus de celui du CIM, on peut capitaliser, manipuler et raisonner une connaissance permettant d’une part de caractériser des collaborations et d’autre part de mettre en place des mécanismes de déduction pour descendre au niveau de CIM. Ces principes sont en outre illustrés par le biais d’un prototype développé pour valider l’approche. ABSTRACT : Enterprises are now operating in an environment where market is more open, globalized, and competitive. Changes in market conditions are obliging enterprises to become involved in various kinds of industrial networks in order to maintain their business efficiency. The integration of business partners depends deeply on the ability to capture and share information seamlessly amongst the information systems (ISs) of different enterprises. The MISE (Mediation Information System Engineering) project was evolved in order to tackle this problem by providing an information technology solution for supporting the enterprise interoperability through ISs. It is developed on the basis of the MDE (Model Driven Engineering). This dissertation addresses the business level of the interoperability, and the CIM (Computer Independent Model) of the MDE. Its main objective is to develop a knowledge-based system for supporting the design of collaborative processes that conform to the BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation). We propose to work at the upper level of the CIM to capture knowledge that allows us to characterize collaboration by basing on the perspectives and experiences of business partners. We use this knowledge together with the existing knowledge (instances about business processes) from the MIT Process Handbook for moving down to the CIM level. The prototype of our knowledge-based system is also developed in order to validate and evaluate the approach

A Social Platform for Knowledge Gathering and Exploitation, Towards the Deduction of Inter-enterprise Collaborations

AbstractSeveral standards have been defined for enhancing the efficiency of B2B web-supported collaboration. However, they suffer from the lack of a general semantic representation, which leaves aside the promise of deducing automatically the inter-enterprise business processes. To achieve the automatic deduction, this paper presents a social platform, which aims at acquiring knowledge from users and linking the acquired knowledge with the one maintained on the platform. Based on this linkage, this platform aims at deducing automatically cross-organizational business processes (i.e. selection of partners and sequencing of their activities) to fulfill any opportunity of collaboration

Semantic discovery and reuse of 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 modelling 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. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

An AI framework and a metamodel for collaborative situations: Application to crisis management contexts

Identifying, designing, deploying and maintaining accurate collaborative networks of organizations (e.g. responders in a crisis situation) are key activities in nowadays ecosystems. However, there is a lack regarding formal approaches dedicated to characterize collaborative networks of organizations. Formal descriptions of collaborative situations, that could be used, transformed, computed and exploited would be of great benefit for the quality of such collaborative networks. This article presents a model‐based AI framework for describing collaborative situations and the associated formal metamodel dedicated to be instantiated to characterize collaborative situations in a very wide range of application domains. This metamodel (describing collaborative situation between organizations) is structured according to four complementary dimensions: the context (social, physical and geographical environment), the partners (the involved organizations, their capabilities resources and relations), the objectives (the aims of the network, the goals to be the achieved and the risks to avoid, etc.) and the behaviour (the collaborative processes to be implemented by the partners to achieve the objectives in the considered context). Besides, this metamodel can be extended for some precise application domains. This article focuses on this mechanism in the specific context of crisis management

Towards the measurement of Enterprise Information Systems agility to support EIS improving projects

International audienceEnterprise information systems (EIS) are directly implied in the global performance of an organisation. Nevertheless, their potential rigidity in comparison with the required fast evolution of the supported organisation remains an important open research question. The proposed research work aims to define and evaluate the agility of an EIS, in order to assist both software engineers and business managers in EIS improvement projects. In particular, a framework is proposed to structure the different existing metrics on agility according to the improvements needs and the intrinsic characteristics of an information system