Proceedings of the 2008 Oxford University Computing Laboratory student conference.

This conference serves two purposes. First, the event is a useful pedagogical exercise for all participants, from the conference committee and referees, to the presenters and the audience. For some presenters, the conference may be the first time their work has been subjected to peer-review. For others, the conference is a testing ground for announcing work, which will be later presented at international conferences, workshops, and symposia. This leads to the conference's second purpose: an opportunity to expose the latest-and-greatest research findings within the laboratory. The fourteen abstracts within these proceedings were selected by the programme and conference committee after a round of peer-reviewing, by both students and staff within this department

Enabling Personalized Business Process Modeling: The Clavii BPM Platform

Increasing adoption of business process management systems has resulted in large business process models comprising hundreds of activities. Particularly, such process models are hard to understand and maintain. This issue requires innovative approaches to simplify and personalize process models. Therefore, this thesis introduces fundamentals for process views offering personalized perspectives for process participants by abstracting not necessary information. Furthermore, an approach for a domain-specific process modeling language, so-called Process Query Language, is presented. The latter offers process modeling notation independent abilities to define, search, and modify process models as well as process views. The proof-of-concept implementation, so-called Clavii BPM platform, shows up as integrated solution for simple, web-based business process modeling and execution. Thus, it implements basic concepts for process views and the PQL language

Enabling Flexibility in Process-Aware Information Systems: Challenges, Methods, Technologies

In today’s dynamic business world, the success of a company increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Companies have therefore identified process agility as a competitive advantage to address business trends like increasing product and service variability or faster time to market, and to ensure business IT alignment. Along this trend, a new generation of information systems has emerged—so-called process-aware information systems (PAIS), like workflow management systems, case handling tools, and service orchestration engines. With this book, Reichert and Weber address these flexibility needs and provide an overview of PAIS with a strong focus on methods and technologies fostering flexibility for all phases of the process lifecycle (i.e., modeling, configuration, execution and evolution). Their presentation is divided into six parts. Part I starts with an introduction of fundamental PAIS concepts and establishes the context of process flexibility in the light of practical scenarios. Part II focuses on flexibility support for pre-specified processes, the currently predominant paradigm in the field of business process management (BPM). Part III details flexibility support for loosely specified processes, which only partially specify the process model at build-time, while decisions regarding the exact specification of certain model parts are deferred to the run-time. Part IV deals with user- and data-driven processes, which aim at a tight integration of processes and data, and hence enable an increased flexibility compared to traditional PAIS. Part V introduces existing technologies and systems for the realization of a flexible PAIS. Finally, Part VI summarizes the main ideas of this book and gives an outlook on advanced flexibility issues. The attached pdf file gives a preview on Chapter 3 of the book which explains the book's overall structure

Abstraction, Visualization, and Evolution of Process Models

The increasing adoption of process orientation in companies and organizations has resulted in large process model collections. Each process model of such a collection may comprise dozens or hundreds of elements and captures various perspectives of a business process, i.e., organizational, functional, control, resource, or data perspective. Domain experts having only limited process modeling knowledge, however, hardly comprehend such large and complex process models. Therefore, they demand for a customized (i.e., personalized) view on business processes enabling them to optimize and evolve process models effectively. This thesis contributes the proView framework to systematically create and update process views (i.e., abstractions) on process models and business processes respectively. More precisely, process views abstract large process models by hiding or combining process information. As a result, they provide an abstracted, but personalized representation of process information to domain experts. In particular, updates of a process view are supported, which are then propagated to the related process model as well as associated process views. Thereby, up-to-dateness and consistency of all process views defined on any process model can be always ensured. Finally, proView preserves the behaviour and correctness of a process model. Process abstractions realized by views are still not sufficient to assist domain experts in comprehending and evolving process models. Thus, additional process visualizations are introduced that provide text-based, form-based, and hierarchical representations of process models. Particularly, these process visualizations allow for view-based process abstractions and updates as well. Finally, process interaction concepts are introduced enabling domain experts to create and evolve process models on touch-enabled devices. This facilitates the documentation of process models in workshops or while interviewing process participants at their workplace. Altogether, proView enables domain experts to interact with large and complex process models as well as to evolve them over time, based on process model abstractions, additional process visualizations, and process interaction concepts. The framework is implemented in a proof-ofconcept prototype and validated through experiments and case studies

25 Desafíos de la Modelación de Procesos Semánticos

Process modeling has become an essential part of many organizations for documenting, analyzing and redesigning their business operations and to support them with suitable information systems. In order to serve this purpose, it is important for process models to be well grounded in for- mal and precise semantics. While behavioural semantics of process models are well understood, there is a considerable gap of research into the semantic aspects of their text labels and natural lan- guage descriptions. The aim of this paper is to make this research gap more transparent. To this end, we clarify the role of textual content in process models and the challenges that are associated with the interpretation, analysis, and improvement of their natural language parts. More specifically, we discuss particular use cases of semantic process modeling to identify 25 challenges. For each cha- llenge, we identify prior research and discuss directions for addressing themEl modelado de procesos se ha convertido en una parte esencial de muchas organizaciones para documentar, analizar, y rediseñar sus operaciones de negocios y apoyarlos con información apropiada. Para cumplir este fin, es importante para estos que estén completos dentro de una semántica formal y precisa. Mientras la semántica del comportamiento del modelado de procesos se entiende bien, hay una considerable laguna en la investigación entre los aspectos semánticos de sus rótulos textuales, y las descripciones en lenguaje natural. El objetivo de este artículo es hacer esta laguna en la investigación más transparente. Con este fin, clarificamos el papel del contenido textual en los modelos de proceso, y los retos relacionados con la interpretación, el análisis, y desarrollo de sus partes en lenguaje natural. De forma más específica, debatimos los casos particulares del uso del modelado de procesos semánticos para identificar 25 retos. Para cada reto, identificamos antes de la investigación y debatimos las direcciones para dirigirnos a ellos

Coding by Design: GPT-4 empowers Agile Model Driven Development

Generating code from a natural language using Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, seems groundbreaking. Yet, with more extensive use, it's evident that this approach has its own limitations. The inherent ambiguity of natural language presents challenges for complex software designs. Accordingly, our research offers an Agile Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach that enhances code auto-generation using OpenAI's GPT-4. Our work emphasizes "Agility" as a significant contribution to the current MDD method, particularly when the model undergoes changes or needs deployment in a different programming language. Thus, we present a case-study showcasing a multi-agent simulation system of an Unmanned Vehicle Fleet. In the first and second layer of our approach, we constructed a textual representation of the case-study using Unified Model Language (UML) diagrams. In the next layer, we introduced two sets of constraints that minimize model ambiguity. Object Constraints Language (OCL) is applied to fine-tune the code constructions details, while FIPA ontology is used to shape communication semantics and protocols. Ultimately, leveraging GPT-4, our last layer auto-generates code in both Java and Python. The Java code is deployed within the JADE framework, while the Python code is deployed in PADE framework. Concluding our research, we engaged in a comprehensive evaluation of the generated code. From a behavioural standpoint, the auto-generated code aligned perfectly with the expected UML sequence diagram. Structurally, we compared the complexity of code derived from UML diagrams constrained solely by OCL to that influenced by both OCL and FIPA-ontology. Results indicate that ontology-constrained model produce inherently more intricate code, but it remains manageable and low-risk for further testing and maintenance

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

25 Challenges of Semantic Process Modeling

Process modeling has become an essential part of many organizations for documenting, analyzing and redesigning their business operations and to support them with suitable information systems. In order to serve this purpose, it is important for process models to be well grounded in formal and precise semantics. While behavioural semantics of process models are well understood, there is a considerable gap of research into the semantic aspects of their text labels and natural language descriptions. The aim of this paper is to make this research gap more transparent. To this end, we clarify the role of textual content in process models and the challenges that are associated with the interpretation, analysis, and improvement of their natural language parts. More specifically, we discuss particular use cases of semantic process modeling to identify 25 challenges. For each challenge, we identify prior research and discuss directions for addressing them

Formal semantics for refinement verification of entreprise models

In this dissertation we investigate how Business/IT alignment in enterprise models can be enhanced by using a software engineering stepwise refinement paradigm. To have an IT system that supports an enterprise and meets the enterprise business needs, management seeks to align business system with IT systems. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is the discipline that addresses the design of aligned business and IT systems. SEAM is an Enterprise Architecture method, developed in the Laboratory of Systemic Modeling (LAMS) at EPFL. SEAM defines a visual language for building an enterprise model of an organization. In this work, we develop a theory and propose a technique to validate an alignment between the system specifications expressed in the SEAM language. We base our reasoning on the idea that each system (an organization, a business system, or an IT system) can be modeled using a set of hierarchical specifications, explicitly related to each other. Considering these relations as refinement relations, we transform the problem of alignment validation into the problem of refinement verification for system specifications: we consider that two system specifications are aligned if one is correctly refines the other. Model-driven engineering (MDE) defines refinement as a transformation between two visual (or program) specifications, where a specification is gradually refined into an implementation. MDE, however, does not formalize refinement verification. Software engineering (SE) formalizes refinement for program specifications. It provides a theory and techniques for refinement verification. To benefit from the formal theories and the refinement verification techniques defined in SE, we extend the SEAM language with additional concepts (e.g. preconditions, postconditions, invariants, etc). This extension enables us to increase the precision of the SEAM visual specifications. Then we define a formal semantics for the extended SEAM modeling language. This semantics is based on first-order logic and set theory; it allows us to reduce the problem of refinement verification to the validation of a first-order logic formula. In software engineering, the tools for the automated analysis of program specifications are defined. To use these tools for refinement verification, we define a translation from SEAM visual specifications to formal specification languages. We apply, using case studies, our theory and technique in several problem areas to verify: (1) if a business process design and re-design correspond to high level business process specifications; (2) if a service implementation corresponds to its specifications. These case studies have been presented to a group of domain experts who practice business/IT alignment. This inquiry has shown that our research has a potential practical value