Discovering mapping between artifact-centric business process models and execution logs

Klassikaliselt on kirjeldatud töövoogusi protsessidele orienteeritud kujul, kus keskendutakse tervele töövoole ja tegevustele selles. Hiljuti on esile kerkinud uudne, artefakti keskne modelleerimine, kus on oluliseks just äriobjektid ning nende vahelised seosed. Artefakti põhised meetodid nõuavad ka muudatusi protsessianalüüsi tehnikates. Üks võimalik protsesside analüüsi meetod on käivituslogide vastavuse kontrollimine protsessi mudeliga, mille abil saab tuvastada kas süsteem käitub nii nagu planeeritud. Mudeli ja logide vastavuse kontrollimiseks on vaja teada, millised sündmused logides vastavad millistele tegevustele mudelis. Töö eemärgiks on automaatselt tuvastada seosed artefakti põhiste protsessimudelites olevate tegevuste ja töövoosüsteemi logides olevate sündmuste vahel. Selline seose tuvastamine pole triviaalne, kuna võib esineda, et sündmuste nimed logides ja tegevuste nimed mudelis ei ole vastavuses. Näiteks ei jälgita samasid standardeid nimetamisel. Samuti on vaja seoste automaatne tuletamine, kui on teada, et logide ja mudeli vahel on mittesobivused ning kõiki sündmuseid ja tegevusi ei saagi vastavusse viia. Automaatne tuvastamine aitab lihtsustada kasutaja tööd. Lahenduseks pakutud meetod kasutab sisendina Procleti põhist mudelit ja käivituslogi süsteemist. Et leida seos mudeli ja logide vahel, viiakse mõlemad graafi kujule. Seosed leitakse iga artefakti kohta eraldi ning ei kasutata infot nende omavahelise suhtluse kohta. Iga artefakti kohta eraldatakse nende Petri võrk ning koostatakse käitumisrelatsioonid, mis väljendavad kuidas on tegevused antud artefaktis omavahel seotud. Sellest koostatakse graaf, mille tippudeks saavad tegevused ning kaarteks tippude vahel käitumisseosed nende vahel. Analoogselt koostatakse graaf iga logis esinenud olemi kohta. Kasutaja poolt sisestatud olemite ja artefaktide tüüpide vahelise seoste abil leitakse iga vastava olemi ja artefakti isendi tegevuste ja sündmuste vahelised seosed. Seoste leidmine taandub kahe graafi vaheliste tippude kujutuse leidmisele. Seoste leidmiseks esmalt arvutatakse sarnasused tegevuste nimede vahel ning selle põhjal leitakse kujutus, mis minimiseeriks teisenduskaugust graafide vahel antud kujutuse põhjal. Kujutuse leimiseks kasutatakse ahnet algoritmi. Praktilise eksperimendina testiti meetodit erinevate mudelite ja logide kombinatsioonidel. Tulemused näitavad, et meetod on võimeline seoseid leidma, kuid tulemuste kvaliteet sõltub palju tegevuste ja sündmuste nimede sarnasusest ja vähem struktuurilisest sarnasustest

Modeling Process Interactions with Coordination Processes

With the rise of data-centric process management paradigms, small and interdependent processes, such as artifacts or object lifecycles, form a business process by interacting with each other. To arrive at a meaningful overall business process, these process interactions must be coordinated. One challenge is the proper consideration of one-to-many and many-to-many relations between interacting processes. Other challenges arise from the flexible, concurrent execution of the processes. Relational process structures and semantic relationships have been proposed for tackling these individual challenges. This paper introduces coordination processes, which bring together both relational process structures and semantic relationships, leveraging their features to enable proper coordination support for interdependent, concurrently running processes. Coordination processes contribute an abstracted and concise model for coordinating the highly complex interactions of interrelated processes

Striving for Object-aware Process Support: How Existing Approaches Fit Together

Many limitations of contemporary process management systems (PrMS) can be traced back to the missing integration of processes and data. A unified understanding of the inherent relationships existing between processes and data, however, is still missing. In the PHILharmonicFlows project we figured out that process support often requires object-awareness. This means, data must be manageable in terms of object types comprising object attributes and relations to other object types. In this paper, we systematically introduce the fundamental characteristics of object-aware processes. Further, we elaborate existing approaches recognizing the need for a tighter integration of processes and data along these characteristics. This way, we show the high relevance of the identified characteristics and confirm that their support is needed in many application domains

Coordinating Large Distributed Relational Process Structures

Representing a business process as a collaboration of interacting processes has become feasible with the emergence of data-centric business process management paradigms. Usually, these interacting processes have relations and, thereby, form a complex relational process structure. The interactions of processes within this relational process structure need to be coordinated to arrive at a meaningful overall business goal. However, relational process structures may become arbitrarily large. With the use of cloud technology, they may additionally be distributed over multiple nodes, allowing for scalability. Coordination processes have been proposed to coordinate relational process structures, where processes may have one-to-many and many-to-many relations at run-time. This paper shows how multiple coordination processes can be used in a decentralized fashion to more efficiently coordinate large, distributed process structures. The main challenge of using multiple coordination processes is to effectively realize the coordination responsibility of each coordination process. Key components of the solution are the subsidiary principle and the hierarchy of the relational process structure. Finally, an implementation of the coordination process concept based on microservices was developed, which allows for fast and concurrent enactment of multiple, decentralized coordination processes in large, distributed process structures

Towards Object-aware Process Management Systems: Issues, Challenges, Benefits

Contemporary workflow management systems (WfMS) offer promising perspectives in respect to comprehensive lifecycle support of business processes. However, there still exist numerous business applications with hard-coded process logic. Respective application software is both complex to design and costly to maintain. One major reason for the absence of workflow technology in these applications is the fact that many processes are data-driven; i.e., progress of process instances depends on value changes of data objects. Thus business processes and business data cannot be treated independently from each other, and business process models have to be compliant with the underlying data structure. This paper presents characteristic properties of data-oriented business software, which we gathered in several case studies, and it elaborates to what degree existing WfMS are able to provide the needed object-awareness. We show that the activity-centered paradigm of existing WfMS is too inflexible in this context, and we discuss major requirements needed to enable object-awareness in processes management systems

The Relational Process Structure

Using data-centric process paradigms, small processes such as artifacts, object lifecycles, or Proclets have become an alternative to large, monolithic models. In these paradigms, a business process arises from the interactions between small processes. However, many-to-many relationships may exist between different process types, requiring careful consideration to ensure that the interactions between processes can be purposefully coordinated. Although several concepts exist for modeling interrelated processes, a concept that considers both many-to-many relationships and cardinality constraints is missing. Furthermore, existing concepts focus on design-time, neglecting the complexity introduced by many-to-many relationships when enacting extensive process structures at run-time. The knowledge which process instances are related to which other process instances is essential. This paper proposes the relational process structure, a concept providing full support for many-to-many-relationships and cardinality constraints at both design- and run-time. The relational process structure represents a cornerstone to the proper coordination of interrelated processes