Providing Integrated Life Cycle Support in Process-Aware Information Systems

The need for more flexibility of process-aware information systems (PAISs) has been discussed for several years and different approaches for adaptive process management have emerged. However, only few of them provide support for both changes of individual process instances and the propagation of process type changes to a collection of related process instances. Furthermore, knowledge about process changes has not yet been exploited by any of these systems. This paper presents the ProCycle approach which overcomes this practical limitation by capturing the whole process life cycle and all kinds of changes in an integrated way. Users are not only allowed to deviate from the predefined process in exceptional situations, but are also assisted in retrieving and reusing knowledge about previously performed changes in this context. If similar instance deviations occur frequently, process engineers will be supported in deriving improved process models from them. This, in turn, allows engineers to evolve the PAIS (including the knowledge about the changes) over time. Feasability of the ProCycle approach is demonstrated by a proof-of-concept prototype which combines adaptive process management technology with concepts and methods provided by case-based reasoning (CBR) technology

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

Ein Ansatz zur Geschäftsmodellierung in der frühen Schiffsentwurfsphase

This dissertation presents an enterprise modeling approach to support the efficiency and dynamic nature of the ship early design phase. The modeling approach is based on the principle concept of the integration between data and process. This concept is applied by taking into consideration the specifications of the early design stage. Therefore, an information model as well as a process model for the ship in the early design stage are developed. Thereby, predefined activity as well as configuration concepts are applied to represent the early design process and support its integrated nature

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

Adaptation des processus collaboratifs par coordination des changements et migration des instances

Le changement en entreprise a toujours été une réalité. De ce fait, les processus d'affaires subissent des altérations régulièrement. La flexibilité des systèmes de gestion des processus est donc cruciale. Puisque les processus d'affaires s'exécutent habituellement sur une longue période, la capacité des systèmes d'effectuer ces changements aux processus lorsqu'ils sont en cours d'exécution est quasi indispensable. Grâce aux architectures fondées sur les services, plusieurs organisations indépendantes peuvent contribuer à la réalisation d'une chorégraphie de processus. La complexité de gestion du changement augmente alors en fonction du nombre de participants. Des changements dans de telles chorégraphies doivent être coordonnés au niveau des contrats, des schémas des processus et des instances actives en collaboration. Notre approche de gestion du changement tient compte de tous ces aspects. Nous proposons un protocole pour coordonner le changement dans des chorégraphies de processus, le Change Protocol for Collaboration (CPC). Il assure que les changements soient traités par tous les participants. Nous proposons en plus une méthode d'adaptation dynamique des processus collaboratifs par migration des instances, et ce, de manière semi-automatisée. Aucune solution d'adaptation dynamique n'avait encore été proposée tenant compte de la collaboration d'instances actives. \ud ______________________________________________________________________________ \ud MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : architecture fondée sur les services, processus d'affaires, processus collaboratifs, chorégraphie, évolution des processus, coordination du changement, changement dynamique, migration des instances

A generic provenance framework to document public policy making processes

Public policies impact the day to day activities of individuals. Effective public policy outcomes result in general acceptance among the community. The transparency in policy making process and participation during policy creation holds significant positions for developing trust among the community. Established domains such as e-health employs provenance for creating transparency and trust among the researchers. Public policy making can also use provenance to develop trust and transparency in their processes. At present, however, public policy makers employ various means to manage public policy making. Having no unified platform for the policy making process presents challenges in respect of searching and locating the evidence that was used during policy creation and for ensuring trust and transparency among actors. The absence of such a support also presents challenges for participation in public policy making. To address the given challenges, this research presents the provenance framework that manages the public policy making provenance data and enable participation of diverse actors.Due to dynamicity attached to public policy making, a provenance framework needs to be adaptable. Therefore, a model-driven approach has been used to frame the public policy making provenance framework. In addition to a model-driven approach, a mechanism is required that can enable the capture of public policy processes. However, the knowledge-intensive dynamics of public policy making presents challenges for using process-based solutions. Therefore, this research work describes a process-agnostic approach inspired from a network-based packet switching approach for tracking policy making processes. Managing public policy provenance data is not the only facet that develops trust. What is required is the facilitation of citizens and non-government bodies in the policy creation process. Therefore, a provenance framework has been designed by considering the principles of smart governance which results in a smart cities solution. In order to evaluate the framework, a proof-of-concept has been designed and implemented. An evaluation has been carried out to determine the suitability of a model-driven and a process-agnostic approach for policy making provenance framework in smart cities. For the evaluation purposes, three public policy making case studies Shops Opening Hours’ Resolution, Air Quality Monitoring, and Neighbourhood Planning were employed. The three case studies were used to derive various experiments to test the provenance framework. The experiments captured the dynamic and knowledge-intensive aspects of the provenance framework. The results collected from the execution of the experiments demonstrated the aptness of a process-agnostic approach and model-driven approach for the policy making provenance framework. Lastly, an end user evaluation was carried out to assess the effectiveness of the provenance framework. The positive responses of end users showed the usefulness of the provenance framework

Version management in the business process change context

The current business endures a fast changing environment, which drives organisations to continuously adapt their business processes to new conditions. In this background, the workflow version control plays an important role for the change management of business processes. To better handle the versions of evolving workflow process definitions, a new versioning method is introduced in this paper. To capture the dynamics of the workflow evolvement, we propose a novel version preserving directed graph model to represent the run time evolvement of a workflow process, and devise a series of modification operations to characterise workflow updating on the fly. The extraction of workflow versions from a version preserving graph is also discussed with two different extraction strategies. Particularly, our method allows the execution of multiple workflow instances of different versions within a single graph, and supports the evolvements initiated by temporary changes