Business Process Configuration According to Data Dependency Specification

Configuration techniques have been used in several fields, such as the design of business process models. Sometimes these models depend on the data dependencies, being easier to describe what has to be done instead of how. Configuration models enable to use a declarative representation of business processes, deciding the most appropriate work-flow in each case. Unfortunately, data dependencies among the activities and how they can affect the correct execution of the process, has been overlooked in the declarative specifications and configurable systems found in the literature. In order to find the best process configuration for optimizing the execution time of processes according to data dependencies, we propose the use of Constraint Programming paradigm with the aim of obtaining an adaptable imperative model in function of the data dependencies of the activities described declarative.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2015-63502-C3-2-RFondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regiona

¿Dividir? No, gracias. El miedo a los números y el bajo rendimiento en matemáticas

Las personas que temen a los números suelen tener menos habilidades matemáticas. ¿Podría estar relacionado con pensamientos intrusivos generados por la ansiedad ante las matemáticas? ¿Se trata, más bien, de una mayor dificultad para procesar las cantidades en la línea numérica mental? ¿Existe alguna huella fisiológica de dicha dificultad? Entender cómo la ansiedad matemática afecta a la realización de operaciones numéricas puede permitir a las instituciones educativas y a la sociedad abordar este frecuente fenómeno de una manera más adecuada y eficiente, evitando las consecuencias negativas que acaba teniendo a largo plazo. En el presente artículo repasamos recientes hallazgos a este respecto

Business Internationalization Through the Gender Glasses

This paper aims to offer a diagnosis of exporting companies with an interest in the international market from a gender perspective. To this end, we show descriptive evidence using data from Spain gathered by ICEX. The application of advanced data analysis techniques allows us to explore the characteristics of companies with an interest in internationalization from a gender perspective, whether there are differences both in the use of ICEX support services and in the target markets for this support in the case of woman-led or female-owned companies, and whether there are differences in export pathways from the year 2000 onwards

Using Distributed CSPs to Model Business Processes Agreement in Software Multiprocess

A business process consists of a set of activities which are performed in a coordination way to obtain an objective. Sometimes the definition of this objective using only a classic business processes management is not possible. When the choreography of the processes cannot be defined with a combination of tasks using sequences, conditions, ’xor’, ’or’ and ’split’ control flow patterns, another representation and solution are necessary to be used. This problem makes difficult the decision making in software management projects. In this paper a way to describe a process agreement is described where the execution and the number of tasks execution order of the Web Services cannot be defined. As a case study, the resource distribution in a multiproject development environment is used. In this case, the processes have to achieve an agreement in function of the business rules that relate the processes. In order to achieve this objective, the Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems are used to model and solve this type of problemsJunta de Andalucía P08-TIC-04095Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2009-1371

Constraint-Driven Approach to Support Input Data Decision-Making in Business Process Management Systems

A business process consists of a set of activities that are performed in coordination in an organizational and technical environment (Weske 2007). The base of business process management systems (BPMS) is the explicit representation of business processes with their activities and the execution constraints between them. Compliance rules represent a natural step to include requirements between business functionality and data. For the design of a whole business process management (van der Aalst et al. 2003), it is necessary to design the model of activities and define the causal and temporal relationships between them (Walzer et al. 2008). Compliance rules can help to complete this information, since they can be used to validate business data (Chesani et al. 2008).Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-04095Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2009-1371

Contract-based Diagnosis for Business Process Instances using Business Compliance Rules

In order to increase the quality of business pro cesses when they are automated, the correctness of the activities can be checked by means of an analysis of the corresponding business compli ance rules. By analyzing the trace of an instance of a business process, it is possible to detect the correctness of the process and to determine which activity is faulty. Each activity or set of activities is related to a set of business compliance rules, which work as contracts that the activities must satisfy throughout the dataflow. In order to diagnose a business process instance, not all the activities participate in every single execution, since there are control flows that per mit the execution of several branches for a varied number of times. We propose to automate the di agnosis of these executions of a business process taking into account the involved activities and their business compliance rules. Our main contri butions are related to the construction of the cor responding framework using several techniques related to the constraint programming paradigm to obtain the incorrect activities. The two differ ent proposals consider the tradeoff between the obtaining of the minimal diagnosis and the per formanceJunta de Andalucía P08-TIC-04095Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2009-1371

The fishbowl. A Critical reflection between teachers and Master's students in two interactive LS plans. An experience at the University of Malaga.

The paper aims to present the experience of convergence between two simultaneous and interactive processes of LS development in a Master of Educational Innovation at the University of Malaga in Spain to stimulate the development of critical thinking in education.Purpose- The paper aims to present the experience of convergence between two simultaneous and interactive processes of LS development in a Master of Educational Innovation at the University of Malaga in Spain. Design- Case study of an educational experience in the University context. It involves a group of 30 students, two subjects and 3 teachers. Description: The first version of the experience began 10 years ago (Soto, Serván and Pérez, 2015) Three years ago, the three lecturers set out to incorporate LS as a structure for this task in order to stimulate the development of critical thinking and to improve the tutoring of this work, developing our own teaching task as an explicit LS process. Findings: Among the most significant findings of this dual, parallel and interactive LS process, we can highlight: - The substantive increase in motivation of both students and teachers. - The complexity of integrating and harmonising the roles of observation-inquiry and teaching-by the students and, in the case of teachers, increased by the need to evaluate the learning process developed by the students themselves. - The extraordinary influence of what we have called the fishbowl effect. That is to say, the linking of the two final phases of the LS, placing themselves in the centre of the circle and openly exposing their perception of the weaknesses and strengths of their LS process, has stimulated a powerful simultaneous process of reflection and critical self-evaluation among the components of the small group, which has been strengthened by the final presentation of the teachers' reflections on their own LS. Relevance: The importance of generating simultaneous and interactive LS processes between teachers and students in initial teacher training. Especially the teachers' fishbowl effect, for their strong modeling influence, is so relevant that it appears in all student’s portfolios as one of the most impacting models for their teacher education process.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internaciona Andalucía Tec

Extending BPMN 2.0 for Modelling the Combination of Activities That Involve Data Constraints

The combination of activities to achieve optimal goals sometimes has a complex solution. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0 facilitates the modelling of business processes by providing new artifacts, such as various types of tasks, source of data and relations between tasks. Sometimes, although the order of the activities can be known, the concrete data values that the activities interchange to optimize their behaviour needs to be found, specially when input parameters of an activity affect to the input parameter of the others. Taking into account the lack of priority and clear sequential relationship between the activities of such combination, a deep analysis of possible models and data input values for the activities is necessary. For that reason, an extension of BPMN 2.0 with a new type of sub-process and its associated marker is proposed. The aim of this new sub-process is to define, in an easy way, a combination of several activities to find out, in an automated way, the concrete values of the data handling that optimize an overall objective.Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-04095Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2009-1371

Hybrid business process modeling for the optimization of outcome data

Context: Declarative business processes are commonly used to describe permitted and prohibited actions in a business process. However, most current proposals of declarative languages fail in three aspects: (1) they tend to be oriented only towards the execution order of the activities; (2) the optimization is oriented only towards the minimization of the execution time or the resources used in the business process; and (3) there is an absence of capacity of execution of declarative models in commercial Business Process Management Systems. Objective: This contribution aims at taking into account these three aspects, by means of: (1) the formalization of a hybrid model oriented towards obtaining the outcome data optimization by combining a data-oriented declarative specification and a control-flow-oriented imperative specification; and (2) the automatic creation from this hybrid model to an imperative model that is executable in a standard Business Process Management System. Method: An approach, based on the definition of a hybrid business process, which uses a constraint programming paradigm, is presented. This approach enables the optimized outcome data to be obtained at runtime for the various instances. Results: A language capable of defining a hybrid model is provided, and applied to a case study. Likewise, the automatic creation of an executable constraint satisfaction problem is addressed, whose resolution allows us to attain the optimized outcome data. A brief computational study is also shown. Conclusion: A hybrid business process is defined for the specification of the relationships between declarative data and control-flow imperative components of a business process. In addition, the way in which this hybrid model automatically creates an entirely imperative model at design time is also defined. The resulting imperative model, executable in any commercial Business Process Management System, can obtain, at execution time, the optimized outcome data of the process.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2009-1371

Towards the Detection of Promising Processes by Analysing the Relational Data

Business process discovery provides mechanisms to extract the general process behaviour from event observations. However, not always the logs are available and must be extracted from repositories, such as relational databases. Derived from the references that exist between the relational tables, several are the possible combinations of traces of events that can be extracted from a relational database. Dif ferent traces can be extracted depending on which attribute represents the case−id, what are the attributes that represent the execution of an activity, or how to obtain the timestamp to define the order of the events. This paper proposes a method to analyse a wide range of possible traces that could be extracted from a relational database, based on measuring the level of interest of extracting a trace log, later used for a discov ery process. The analysis is done by means of a set of proposed metrics before the traces are generated and the process is discovered. This anal ysis helps to reduce the computational cost of process discovery. For a possible case−id every possible traces are analysed and measured. To validate our proposal, we have used a real relational database, where the detection of processes (most and least promising) are compared to rely on our proposal.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología RTI2018-094283-B-C3