Toward an Adaptive Enterprise Modelling Platform

For the past three decades, enterprise modelling (EM) has been emerging as a significant yet complex paradigm to tackle holistic systematic enterprise analysis and design. With a high fluctuation in the global economy, industrial stability and technology shift, the necessity of such paradigms becomes crucial in determining the decisions that an enterprise can make for surviving in such a highly dynamic business ecosystem. EM practices have focused for a long time, on the design-time of enterprise systems. Recently, there has been a rapid development in data analytics, machine learning and intelligent systems from which an EM platform can benefit. EM needs to cope with the new changes in both business and technology; it should also help architects to determine optimum decisions and reduce complexity in technical infrastructure. In this paper, the author discusses several challenges facing enterprise modelling practices and offers an architectural notion for future development focusing on the requirements of a platform that can be called intelligent and adaptive

On Enabling Integrated Process Compliance with Semantic Constraints in Process Management Systems

Key to broad use of process management systems (PrMS) in practice is their ability to foster and ease the implementation, execution, monitoring, and adaptation of business processes while still being able to ensure robust and error-free process enactment. To meet these demands a variety of mechanisms has been developed to prevent errors at the structural level (e.g., deadlocks). In many application domains, however, processes often have to comply with business level rules and policies (i.e., semantic constraints) as well. Hence, to ensure error-free executions at the semantic level, PrMS need certain control mechanisms for validating and ensuring the compliance with semantic constraints. In this paper, we discuss fundamental requirements for a comprehensive support of semantic constraints in PrMS. Moreover, we provide a survey on existing approaches and discuss to what extent they are able to meet the requirements and which challenges still have to be tackled. In order to tackle the particular challenge of providing integrated compliance support over the process lifecycle, we introduce the SeaFlows framework. The framework introduces a behavioural level view on processes which serves a conceptual process representation for constraint specification approaches. Further, it provides general compliance criteria for static compliance validation but also for dealing with process changes. Altogether, the SeaFlows framework can serve as formal basis for realizing integrated support of semantic constraints in PrMS

Towards a resilient networked service system

Large service systems today are of highly network structures. In this thesis, these large service systems are called networked service systems. The network nature of these systems has no doubt brought mass customized services but has also created challenges in the management of their safety. The safety of service systems is an important issue due to their critical influences on the functioning of society. Traditional safety engineering methods focus on maintaining service systems in a safe state, in particular aiming to maintain systems to be reliable and robust. However, resilience cannot be absent from safety out of many recent disasters that occur in society. The goal of this thesis is to improve the resilience of networked service systems. Four major works have been performed to achieve this goal. First, a unified definition of service systems was proposed and its relationship to other system concepts was unfolded. Upon the new definition, a domain model of service systems was established by a FCBPSS framework, followed by developing a computational model. Second, a definition of resilience for service systems was proposed, based on which the relationship among three safety properties (i.e., reliability, robustness and resilience) was clarified, followed by developing a framework for resilience analysis. Third, a methodology of resilience measurement for service systems was proposed by four measurement axioms along with corresponding mathematical models. The methodology focused on the potential ability of a service system to create optimal rebalancing solutions. Two typical service systems, transportation system and enterprise information system, were employed to validate the methodology. Fourth, a methodology of enhancing resilience for service systems was proposed by integrating three types of reconfigurations of systems, namely design, planning and management, along with the corresponding mathematical model. This methodology was validated by an example of transportation system. Several conclusions can be drawn from the work above: (1) a service system has a unique characteristic that it meets humans' demand directly, and its safety relies on the balance between the supplies and demands; (2) different from reliability and robustness, the resilience of a service system focuses on the rebalancing ability from imbalanced situations; (3) it makes sense to measure the resilience of a service system only for a particular imbalanced situation and based on evaluation of rebalancing solutions; and (4) integration of design, planning and management is an effective approach for improvement of the resilience for a service system. The contributions of this thesis can be summarized. Scientifically, this thesis work has improved our understanding of service systems and their resilience property; furthermore, this work has advanced the state of knowledge of safety science in particular having successfully responded to two questions: is a service system safe and how to make a service system safer? Technologically or methodologically, the work has advanced the knowledge for modeling and optimization of networked service systems in particular with multiple layer models along with the algorithms for integrated decision making on design, planning, and management

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

Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. Multi-agent systems have been brought up and used in several application domains

24th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases

In the last three decades information modelling and knowledge bases have become essentially important subjects not only in academic communities related to information systems and computer science but also in the business area where information technology is applied. The series of European – Japanese Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases (EJC) originally started as a co-operation initiative between Japan and Finland in 1982. The practical operations were then organised by professor Ohsuga in Japan and professors Hannu Kangassalo and Hannu Jaakkola in Finland (Nordic countries). Geographical scope has expanded to cover Europe and also other countries. Workshop characteristic - discussion, enough time for presentations and limited number of participants (50) / papers (30) - is typical for the conference. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: 1. Conceptual modelling: Modelling and specification languages; Domain-specific conceptual modelling; Concepts, concept theories and ontologies; Conceptual modelling of large and heterogeneous systems; Conceptual modelling of spatial, temporal and biological data; Methods for developing, validating and communicating conceptual models. 2. Knowledge and information modelling and discovery: Knowledge discovery, knowledge representation and knowledge management; Advanced data mining and analysis methods; Conceptions of knowledge and information; Modelling information requirements; Intelligent information systems; Information recognition and information modelling. 3. Linguistic modelling: Models of HCI; Information delivery to users; Intelligent informal querying; Linguistic foundation of information and knowledge; Fuzzy linguistic models; Philosophical and linguistic foundations of conceptual models. 4. Cross-cultural communication and social computing: Cross-cultural support systems; Integration, evolution and migration of systems; Collaborative societies; Multicultural web-based software systems; Intercultural collaboration and support systems; Social computing, behavioral modeling and prediction. 5. Environmental modelling and engineering: Environmental information systems (architecture); Spatial, temporal and observational information systems; Large-scale environmental systems; Collaborative knowledge base systems; Agent concepts and conceptualisation; Hazard prediction, prevention and steering systems. 6. Multimedia data modelling and systems: Modelling multimedia information and knowledge; Contentbased multimedia data management; Content-based multimedia retrieval; Privacy and context enhancing technologies; Semantics and pragmatics of multimedia data; Metadata for multimedia information systems. Overall we received 56 submissions. After careful evaluation, 16 papers have been selected as long paper, 17 papers as short papers, 5 papers as position papers, and 3 papers for presentation of perspective challenges. We thank all colleagues for their support of this issue of the EJC conference, especially the program committee, the organising committee, and the programme coordination team. The long and the short papers presented in the conference are revised after the conference and published in the Series of “Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence” by IOS Press (Amsterdam). The books “Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases” are edited by the Editing Committee of the conference. We believe that the conference will be productive and fruitful in the advance of research and application of information modelling and knowledge bases. Bernhard Thalheim Hannu Jaakkola Yasushi Kiyok

Ähnlichkeitsbasierte Suche in Geschäftsprozessmodelldatenbanken

Die Wiederverwendung von Prozessmodellen bietet sich zur Reduzierung des hohen Modellierungsaufwands an. Allerdings ist das Auffinden von ähnlichen Modellen in großen Modellsammlungen manuell nicht effizient möglich. Hilfreich sind daher Suchmöglichkeiten nach relevanten Modellen, die als Vorlage zur Modellierung genutzt werden können. In dieser Arbeit werden Ansätze beschrieben, um innerhalb von Prozessmodellbibliotheken nach ähnlichen Modellen und Aktivitäten zu suchen

The effect of business process reengineering (BPR) on public sector organisation performance in a developing economy context

This research develops a research model to analyse whether the implementation of BPR by public organisations in the developing economies contributes to the business process and overall organisational performance. BPR has been widely adopted by private businesses and has been a focus of research since the 1990s and it is still one of the top five management concerns for information technology (IT) executives globally. However, BPR’s adoption in the public sector in general, and public sectors in developing economies in particular, is a relatively recent and little researched phenomenon. The concept of New Public Management (NPM) and public sector pressure for administration efficiency, transparency, good governance, accountability and e-Government is the major driving force behind embracing and practicing BPR by the public sector in the developing economies. Public sector BPR literature shows that there is lack of research that theorises validates and develops a measurement model to evaluate the organisational performance effect of public sector BPR in general and those in developing economies in particular. Given the fact that developing economies are investing heavily in BPR with the aim of modernising public administration, there is, therefore, a need for empirical investigation of whether BPR is improving their performance. Hence, the main research question addressed in this research is: Does BPR matter to the performance of public sector organisations? The research’s conceptual foundation is based on resource-based view (RBV) theory and its complementary competence perspective; BPR literature and the public sector organisation performance literature; and from findings of the exploratory study. The framework establishes the relationships between BPR resources and implementation issues, BPR depth and BPR outcome and impact, and develops 13 hypotheses. The research pursues the positivist paradigm. Both interview (n = 16) and survey (n = 209) methods are used to collect data in two stages—exploratory study and main study—from public administration organisations in Ethiopia. The psychometric properties of the survey instrument are established through a rigorous procedure involving exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis techniques, using SPSS and AMOS, respectively. The findings show that a public sector organisation in a developing economy can use BPR to improve process and overall organisational performance if it (a) has accumulated stock of BPR-relevant resources and capabilities; (b) has undertaken BPR with sufficient depth; (c) is developing a post-BPR complementary competencies to sustain and further enhance the BPR changes; and (d) has mitigated the negative effect of BPR implementation problems. The research model explains 54% and 40% of the variance in organisational and business process performance, respectively. The research makes an original contribution to public sector BPR literature through its development and validation of the model and accompanying measurement instrument. In particular, the conception, measurement, hypotheses and empirical findings of the BPR complementary competency construct represent a significant contribution in advancing the theoretical foundation and the empirical basis of the BPR, public sector BPR and developing economy BPR literature. The research also offers relevant recommendations to public managers and BPR practitioners on how to execute BPR successfully