Translating standard process models to BPEL

Standardisation of languages in the field of business process management has long been an elusive goal. Recently though, consensus has built around one process implementation language, namely BPEL, and two fundamentally similar process modelling notations, namely UML Activity Diagram (UML AD) and BPMN. This paper presents a technique for generating BPEL code from process models expressed in a core subset of BPMN and UML AD. This model-to-code translation is a necessary ingredient to the emergence of model-driven business process development environments based on these standards. The proposed translation has been implemented as an open source tool

Recursion Aware Modeling and Discovery For Hierarchical Software Event Log Analysis (Extended)

This extended paper presents 1) a novel hierarchy and recursion extension to the process tree model; and 2) the first, recursion aware process model discovery technique that leverages hierarchical information in event logs, typically available for software systems. This technique allows us to analyze the operational processes of software systems under real-life conditions at multiple levels of granularity. The work can be positioned in-between reverse engineering and process mining. An implementation of the proposed approach is available as a ProM plugin. Experimental results based on real-life (software) event logs demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the approach and show the huge potential to speed up discovery by exploiting the available hierarchy.Comment: Extended version (14 pages total) of the paper Recursion Aware Modeling and Discovery For Hierarchical Software Event Log Analysis. This Technical Report version includes the guarantee proofs for the proposed discovery algorithm

Beyond Control-Flow: Extending Business Process Configuration to Roles and Objects

A configurable process model is an integrated representation of multiple variants of a business process. It is designed to be individualized to meet a particular set of requirements. As such, configurable process models promote systematic reuse of proven or common practices. Existing notations for configurable process modeling focus on capturing tasks and control-flow dependencies, neglecting equally important aspects of business processes such as data flow, material flow and resource management. This paper fills this gap by proposing an integrated meta-model for configurable processes with advanced features for capturing resources involved in the performance of tasks (through task-role associations) as well as flow of data and physical artifacts (through task-object associations). Although embodied as an extension of a popular process modeling notation, namely EPC, the meta-model is defined in an abstract and formal manner to make it applicable to other notations

On Negotiation as Concurrency Primitive

We introduce negotiations, a model of concurrency close to Petri nets, with multiparty negotiation as primitive. We study the problems of soundness of negotiations and of, given a negotiation with possibly many steps, computing a summary, i.e., an equivalent one-step negotiation. We provide a complete set of reduction rules for sound, acyclic, weakly deterministic negotiations and show that, for deterministic negotiations, the rules compute the summary in polynomial time

RALph: A Graphical Notation for Resource Assignments in Business Processes

The business process (BP) resource perspective deals with the management of human as well as non-human resources throughout the process lifecycle. Although it has received increasing attention recently, there exists no graphical notation for it up until now that is both expressive enough to cover well-known resource selection conditions and independent of the BP modelling language. In this paper, we introduce RALph, a graphical notation for the assignment of human resources to BP activities. We define its semantics by mapping this notation to a language that has been formally defined in description logics, which enables its automated analysis. Although we show how RALph can be seamlessly integrated with BPMN, it is noteworthy that the notation is independent of the BP modelling language. Altogether, RALph will foster the visual modelling of the resource perspective in BP

Reactive Petri Nets for Workflow Modeling

Petri nets are widely used for modeling and analyzing workflows

Determinants of risk: Exposure and vulnerability

Many climate change adaptation efforts aim to address the implications of potential changes in the frequency, intensity, and duration of weather and climate events that affect the risk of extreme impacts on human society. That risk is determined not only by the climate and weather events (the hazards) but also by the exposure and vulnerability to these hazards. Therefore, effective adaptation and disaster risk management strategies and practices also depend on a rigorous understanding of the dimensions of exposure and vulnerability, as well as a proper assessment of changes in those dimensions. This chapter aims to provide that understanding and assessment, by further detailing the determinants of risk as presented in Chapter 1. The first sections of this chapter elucidate the concepts that are needed to define and understand risk, and show that risk originates from a combination of social processes and their interaction with the environment (Sections 2.2 and 2.3), and highlight the role of coping and adaptive capacities (Section 2.4). The following section (2.5) describes the different dimensions of vulnerability and exposure as well as trends therein. Given that exposure and vulnerability are highly context-specific, this section is by definition limited to a general overview (a more quantitative perspective on trends is provided in Chapter 4). A methodological discussion (Section 2.6) of approaches to identify and assess risk provides indications of how the dimensions of exposure and vulnerability can be explored in specific contexts, such as adaptation planning, and the central role of risk perception and risk communication. The chapter concludes with a cross-cutting discussion of risk accumulation and the nature of disasters

A quantitative analysis of faulty EPCs in the SAP reference model

The SAP reference model contains more than 600 non-trivial process models expressed in terms of Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs). We have automatically translated these EPCs into YAWL models and analyzed these models usingWofYAWL, a veri¯cation tool based on Petri nets. We discovered that at least 34 of these EPCs contain errors (i.e., at least 5.6% is °awed). We analyzed which parts of the SAP reference model contain most errors. Moreover, based on 15 characteristics (e.g., the size of the model), we used logistic regression to ¯nd possible pre- dictors for these errors. This systematic analysis of the SAP reference model illustrates the need for veri¯cation tools such as WofYAWL