A Version-based Approach to Address Flexibility of BPMN Collaborations and Choreographies

Process flexibility is an important issue in the business process management area: it has mainly been investigated in the context of intra-organisational processes but it received little attention in the context of processes crossing the boundaries of companies. This paper addresses the issue of BPMN collaborations and choreographies flexibility, advocating a version-based approach. Indeed versions, which have been recognised as a powerful mechanism to face flexibility of internal processes of companies, are used to address flexibility of processes crossing the boundaries of companies, modelled as collaborations or choreographies in BPMN. Thus this paper extends BPMN collaborations using versions. It also introduces algorithms supporting the mapping from versions of collaborations into versions of choreographies. This paper mainly focuses on static aspects of collaboration and choreography versioning

Minimal Length Scale Scenarios for Quantum Gravity

We review the question of whether the fundamental laws of nature limit our ability to probe arbitrarily short distances. First, we examine what insights can be gained from thought experiments for probes of shortest distances, and summarize what can be learned from different approaches to a theory of quantum gravity. Then we discuss some models that have been developed to implement a minimal length scale in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. These models have entered the literature as the generalized uncertainty principle or the modified dispersion relation, and have allowed the study of the effects of a minimal length scale in quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, thermodynamics, black-hole physics and cosmology. Finally, we touch upon the question of ways to circumvent the manifestation of a minimal length scale in short-distance physics.Comment: Published version available at http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2013-

A Version-based Approach to Address Flexibility of BPMN Collaborations and Choreographies

International audienceProcess flexibility is an important issue in the business process management area: it has mainly been investigated in the context of intra-organisational processes but it received little attention in the context of processes crossing the boundaries of companies. This paper addresses the issue of BPMN collaborations and choreographies flexibility, advocating a version-based approach. Indeed versions, which have been recognised as a powerful mechanism to face flexibility of internal processes of companies, are used to address flexibility of processes crossing the boundaries of companies, modelled as collaborations or choreographies in BPMN. Thus this paper extends BPMN collaborations using versions. It also introduces algorithms supporting the mapping from versions of collaborations into versions of choreographies. This paper mainly focuses on static aspects of collaboration and choreography versioning

BPMN4V: an extension of BPMN for Modelling Adaptive Processes using Version

ICEIS 2015 will be held in conjunction with ENASE 2015 and GISTAM 2015International audienceThis paper presents BPMN4V, an extension of BPMN 2.0 to support business process adaptation modelling using versions. It introduces the provided extensions to the BPMN meta-model to take into account the notion of version, considering both static and dynamic aspects of process versions. It also presents BPMN4V-Modeller, an implementation of these extensions. Therefore, using BPMN4V business process designers can model process adaptation, which is an important issue to address before the definitive acceptance and use of business process management systems in companies

A Version-based Approach to Address Flexibility of BPMN Collaborations and Choreographies

International audienceProcess flexibility is an important issue in the business process management area: it has mainly been investigated in the context of intra-organisational processes but it received little attention in the context of processes crossing the boundaries of companies. This paper addresses the issue of BPMN collaborations and choreographies flexibility, advocating a version-based approach. Indeed versions, which have been recognised as a powerful mechanism to face flexibility of internal processes of companies, are used to address flexibility of processes crossing the boundaries of companies, modelled as collaborations or choreographies in BPMN. Thus this paper extends BPMN collaborations using versions. It also introduces algorithms supporting the mapping from versions of collaborations into versions of choreographies. This paper mainly focuses on static aspects of collaboration and choreography versioning

Extending BPMN 2.0 Meta-models for Process Version Modelling

International audienceThis paper introduces BPMN4V (BPMN for Versions), an extension of BPMN for modelling variability (flexibility) of processes before their use in an organizational context or before their publication over the cloud as services. More precisely, this paper motivates the importance of modelling variability of processes using versions and introduces the versioning pattern to be used to reach this objective. It also presents BPMN4V, giving provided extensions to BPMN2.0 meta model, both considering versions of intra and inter-organizational processes. An example illustrating the instantiation of the proposed meta-model is given for each kind of process

Flexibility of Collaborative Processes using Versions and Adaptation Patterns

International audienceProcess aware Information Systems (PaIS) have an ever-increasing importance in Enterprise Information Systems for supporting both their intra and inter-organizational processes. However PaIS still have important issues to address, including flexibility of inter-organizational (i.e., collaborative) processes before their definitive acceptance and their use in companies. This paper addresses this issue advocating (i) the modelling of collaborative processes as BPMN collaboration, (ii) the use of the version notion to deal with collaborative process flexibility and to make process instance migration easier, and (iii) the introduction of 6 new adaptation patterns which are high-level operations for collaborative process schema update

Self-adaptive business processes: a hybrid approach for the resolution of adaptation needs

International audienceTo remain competitive, companies must face the changes occurring in their environment and adapt their business processes accordingly. Those processes are implemented in business process management systems (BPMS), which mostly support manual adaptations. That means that the process users have to detect what changes in the environment require process adaptation, and what adaptation operations have to be performed. Such manual adaptations of processes are costly, time-consuming and error prone tasks. For this reason, some contributions of the literature have tried to address the issue of self-adaptations of processes. But these contributions suffer from shortcomings: isolated use of adaptation techniques, non-coverage of the process dimensions and of the adaptation types, etc.; the adaptation issue remains partially addressed. Thus we recommend in this paper a hybrid approach to ensure autonomic adaptations of running processes. According to this approach, the Plan component tries to find an appropriate model version of the concerned process. Then, if such a version does not exist, it looks to reuse an adaptation case that was applied in the past under a similar situation (context). Finally, if necessary, it applies rules, as an artificial intelligence planning technique, to define an ad hoc adaptation. Moreover, the recommended approach takes advantage of the IBM MAPE-K (Monitor, Analyze, Plan, Execute—Knowledge) control loop from autonomic computing, recognized as a prominent solution for self-adaptation at run-time. More precisely the paper addresses the resolution of adaptation needs while covering three process dimensions and all adaptation types and ensuring the separation of concerns for better portability and wide usability through the BPMN standard. It presents both the required Knowledge and the Plan component of the control loop for this resolution. It also shows the effectiveness of the approach by illustrating self-adaptation of a process from the crisis domain, and demonstrates its feasibility by reporting about its implementation and qualitative and quantitative evaluation

A context-based approach for modelling and querying versions of BPMN processes

International audienceVersioning is an interesting solution to deal with business process flexibility. It consists of the definition of several process versions for taking into account the significant changes occurring to the processes. It allows the running of several instances of the same process according to different models. However, in a multi-version environment, where numerous versions co-exist, it is important to specify the context in which these versions can be used. The context is used in particular to find out, for a given situation, the appropriate process version to be executed at run-time. We aim in this paper at offering a solution to model the context of versions of intra- and inter-organisational processes and query these versions using their context. More precisely the recommended solution extends BPMN2.0, the de-facto standard for process modelling, to consider versions and contexts, and introduces a context based language for versions querying