Using the guard-stage-milestone notation for monitoring BPMN-based processes

Business processes are usually designed by means of imperative languages to model the acceptable execution of the activities performed within a system or an organization. At the same time, declarative languages are better suited to check the conformance of the states and transitions of the modeled process with respect to its actual execution. To avoid defining models twice from scratch to cope with both the process enactment and its monitoring, this paper proposes an approach for translating BPMN process models to E-GSM ones: an extension of the Guard-Stage-Milestone artifact-centric notation. The paper also shows how a monitoring engine based on E-GSM specifications can detect anomalies during the execution of the process and classify them according to different levels of severity, that is, with respect to the impact on the outcome of the process

On Handling Business Process Anomalies through Artifact-based Modeling

Control flow-based process modeling notations, like BPMN, are good at dening the normal execution flow and the management of foreseen exceptions. When unforeseen situations occur, one cannot detect if the execution is still acceptable with respect to the process definition. In contrast, artifact-centric process modeling notations, like the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM), are better suited for this kind of scenarios: they define a process in terms of acceptable states and do not enforce any specific execution flow. This improves flexibility, but hampers the clarity of the defined models. The goal of this paper is to show how an extension of GSM, i.e., E-GSM, can be used to detect deviations from the execution path as modeled in BPMN, while keeping the process execution alive

Declarative process modeling in BPMN

Traditional business process modeling notations, including the standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), rely on an imperative paradigm wherein the process model captures all allowed activity flows. In other words, every flow that is not specified is implicitly disallowed. In the past decade, several researchers have exposed the limitations of this paradigm in the context of business processes with high variability. As an alternative, declarative process modeling notations have been proposed (e.g., Declare). These notations allow modelers to capture constraints on the allowed activity flows, meaning that all flows are allowed provided that they do not violate the specified constraints. Recently, it has been recognized that the boundary between imperative and declarative process modeling is not crisp. Instead, mixtures of declarative and imperative process modeling styles are sometimes preferable, leading to proposals for hybrid process modeling notations. These developments raise the question of whether completely new notations are needed to support hybrid process modeling. This paper answers this question negatively. The paper presents a conservative extension of BPMN for declarative process modeling, namely BPMN-D, and shows that Declare models can be transformed into readable BPMN-D models. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Artifact-driven Process Monitoring: Dynamically Binding Real-world Objects to Running Processes

Monitoring inter-organizational business processes requires explicit knowledge about when activities start and complete. This is a challenge because no single system controls the process, activities might not be directly recorded, and the overall course of execution might only be determined at runtime. In this paper, we address these problems by integrating process monitoring with sensor data from real-world objects. We formalize our approach using the E-GSM artifact-centric language. Since the association between real-world objects and process instances is often only determined at runtime, our approach also caters for dynamic binding and unbinding at runtime

Specifying and Executing User Agents in an Environment of Reasoning and RESTful Systems Using the Guard-Stage-Milestone Approach

For Read-Write Linked Data, an environment of reasoning and RESTful interaction, we investigate the use of the Guard-Stage-Milestone approach for specifying and executing user agents. We present an ontology to specify user agents. Moreover, we give operational semantics to the ontology in a rule language that allows for executing user agents on Read-Write Linked Data. We evaluate our approach formally and regarding performance. Our work shows that despite different assumptions of this environment in contrast to the traditional environment of workflow management systems, the Guard-Stage-Milestone approach can be transferred and successfully applied on the web of Read-Write Linked Data

Data in Business Process Models. A Preliminary Empirical Study

Traditional activity-centric process modeling languages treat data as simple black boxes acting as input or output for activities. Many alternate and emerging process modeling paradigms, such as case handling and artifact-centric process modeling, give data a more central role. This is achieved by introducing lifecycles and states for data objects, which is beneficial when modeling data-or knowledge-intensive processes. We assume that traditional activity-centric process modeling languages lack the capabilities to adequately capture the complexity of such processes. To verify this assumption we conducted an online interview among BPM experts. The results not only allow us to identify various profiles of persons modeling business processes, but also the problems that exist in contemporary modeling languages w.r.t. The modeling of business data. Overall, this preliminary empirical study confirms the necessity of data-awareness in process modeling notations in general

Live Graph Databases Using DCR Graphs

Nowadays, it is of uttermost importance for companies that want to be relevant on the market to produce more while making fewer mistakes. Good management practices recommend the replication of critical business operations, like hiring a new employee and the set up he has to go through to have the company tools available, or the steps and decisions required when producing some daily report. The possibility of creating and refining these processes through business process systems to better suit the daily activity of an enterprise has a direct impact on the overall productivity, organization, and cost-reduction. The commonly used process systems make use of notations that are like state machines, having a somewhat imperative style depicting a narrow path where every decision in a process is sequential – providing the user no chance to offer input on how the process carries out – and struggle to take data into account. The proposal of several declarative languages and notations meant to solve this problem, easily incorporating data alongside the specified workflow, and providing actual control to the end-user on how the processes are accomplished by stating what can/needs to be done rather than how to do it in a step-by-step fashion. With this dissertation we present ReDa, a novel declarative, dynamic, and reactive data-centric process language, and the mapping from its specification to a running system (the operational semantics) implemented using the mechanisms of a graph-database, namely neo4j. We also present and evaluate a prototype of a business process system able to emulate the process via a reactive application, addressing the challenges of having a system that interacts with a dynamic process, and the solutions adopted.Atualmente, para que uma empresa possa ser relevante no mercado é bastante importante que a sua produção aumente e que a sua taxa de erros diminua. Regras de boa prática no que toca ao controlo de processos de uma empresa recomendam que as suas tarefas mais críticas sejam efetuadas da mesma forma independentemente de quem as executa, tal como a contratação de um novo empregado e todos os passos que ele precisa de executar para que reúna as condições necessárias para trabalhar, ou quais os pontos-chave obrigatórios a seguir quando se submetem relatórios. A possibilidade de criar e ajustar estes processos ao dia a dia de uma empresa tem um impacto direto na sua produtividade, organização e redução de custos. Os sistemas de processos mais utilizados adotam notações semelhantes a máquinas de estado, onde definem as suas atividades de uma forma sequencial e têm dificuldade em incorporar dados no processo. A proposta de várias linguagens de processos declarativas tem como objetivo solucionar este problema, permitindo a definição do processo e dos seus dados de forma simultânea e flexível, pois ao invés de se definir uma sequência de execução é possível estabelecer o que pode/tem de ser feito. Com esta dissertação apresentamos a ReDa, uma nova linguagem declarativa, dinâmica e reativa centrada em dados, e um mapeamento desta especificação para um sistema de execução que utiliza os mecanismos de uma base de dados de grafos, nomeadamente o neo4j. Apresentamos e avaliamos também um protótipo de sistema de gestão de processos capaz de emular processos ReDa através de uma aplicação reativa, abordando os desafios de desenvolver um sistema que interaja com um processo dinâmico e as soluções adotadas

mArtifact: an Artifact-driven Process Monitoring Platform

Traditionally, human intervention is required to monitor a business process. Operators notify when manual activities are executed, and manually restart the monitoring whenever the process is not executed as expected. This paper presents mArtifact, an artifact-driven process monitoring platform. mArtifact uses the E-GSM artifact-centric language to represent the process. This way, when a violation occurs, it can flag the affected activities without halting the monitoring. By predicating on the conditions of the physical artifacts participating in a process, mArtifact autonomously detects when activities are executed and constraints are violated. The audience is expected to be familiar with business process monitoring and artifact-centric modeling languages

A Survey on Handling Data in Business Process Models (Discussion Paper)

Traditional activity-centric process modeling languages treat data as simple black boxes acting as input or output for activities. Many alternate and emerging process modeling paradigms, such as case handling and artifact-centric process modeling, give data a more central role. This is achieved by introducing lifecycles and states for data objects, which is beneficial when modeling data- or knowledge-intensive processes. We assume that traditional activity-centric process modeling languages lack the capabilities to adequately capture the complexity of such processes. To verify this assumption, we conducted a survey among Business Process Management experts. The survey results allow us to identify the problems of contemporary modeling languages in regard to the modeling of business data. To this end, survey respondents rated the data modeling capabilities of a variety of business process modeling tools and notations. Overall, the paper confirms the need of data-awareness in process modeling notations in general