Matching Business Process Workflows across Abstraction Levels

In Business Process Modeling, several models are defined for the same system, supporting the transition from business requirements to IT implementations. Each of these models targets a different abstraction level and stakeholder perspective. In order to maintain consistency among these models, which has become a major challenge not only in this field, the correspondence between them has to be identified. A correspondence between process models establishes which activities in one model correspond to which activities in another model. This paper presents an algorithm for determining such correspondences. The algorithm is based on an empirical study of process models at a large company in the banking sector, which revealed frequent correspondence patterns between models spanning multiple abstraction levels. The algorithm has two phases, first establishing correspondences based on similarity of model element attributes such as types and names and then refining the result based on the structure of the models. Compared to previous work, our algorithm can recover complex correspondences relating whole process fragments rather than just individual activities. We evaluate the algorithm on 26 pairs of business-technical and technical-IT level models from four real-world projects, achieving overall precision of 93% and recall of 70%. Given the substantial recall and the high precision, the algorithm helps automating significant part of the correspondence recovery for such models.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2008-03107Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2011-2379

Factors associated with worse lung function in cystic fibrosis patients with persistent staphylococcus aureus

Background Staphylococcus aureus is an important pathogen in cystic fibrosis (CF). However, it is not clear which factors are associated with worse lung function in patients with persistent S. aureus airway cultures. Our main hypothesis was that patients with high S. aureus density in their respiratory specimens would more likely experience worsening of their lung disease than patients with low bacterial loads. Methods Therefore, we conducted an observational prospective longitudinal multi-center study and assessed the association between lung function and S. aureus bacterial density in respiratory samples, co-infection with other CF-pathogens, nasal S. aureus carriage, clinical status, antibiotic therapy, IL-6- and IgG-levels against S. aureus virulence factors. Results 195 patients from 17 centers were followed; each patient had an average of 7 visits. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and generalized linear mixed models. Our main hypothesis was only supported for patients providing throat specimens indicating that patients with higher density experienced a steeper lung function decline (p<0.001). Patients with exacerbations (n = 60), S. aureus small-colony variants (SCVs, n = 84) and co-infection with Stenotrophomonas maltophilia (n = 44) had worse lung function (p = 0.0068; p = 0.0011; p = 0.0103). Patients with SCVs were older (p = 0.0066) and more often treated with trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole (p = 0.0078). IL-6 levels positively correlated with decreased lung function (p<0.001), S. aureus density in sputa (p = 0.0016), SCVs (p = 0.0209), exacerbations (p = 0.0041) and co-infections with S. maltophilia (p = 0.0195) or A. fumigatus (p = 0.0496). Conclusions In CF-patients with chronic S. aureus cultures, independent risk factors for worse lung function are high bacterial density in throat cultures, exacerbations, elevated IL-6 levels, presence of S. aureus SCVs and co-infection with S. maltophilia

Definition and validation of model transformations

Like any piece of software, model transformations must be validated to ensure their usefulness for the intended application. Properties to be validated include syntactic correctness as well as general requirements such as termination and confluence (i.e., the existence of a unique result of the transformation for every valid input). This paper introduces the idea of systematic validation and then focusses on validation of syntactic correctness for rule-based model transformations

Taming Model Round-Trip Engineering

Abstract: Round-trip engineering is a challenging task that will become an important enabler for many Model-Driven Software Development approaches. Model round-trip engineering involves synchronizing models and keeping them consistent, thus enabling the software engineer to freely move between different representations. This vision of complete round-trip engineering is only realized to a limited degree in tools nowadays, and it proves to be a very difficult problem to solve in general. In this paper, our goal is to clarify some of the issues in automating round-trip engineering and point out some of the highlevel qualities that are desirable for round-trip engineering approaches to possess. Clarifying this domain is an important first step towards being able to systematically automate round-trip engineering of models. 1