On Handling Business Process Anomalies through Artifact-based Modeling

Control flow-based process modeling notations, like BPMN, are good at dening the normal execution flow and the management of foreseen exceptions. When unforeseen situations occur, one cannot detect if the execution is still acceptable with respect to the process definition. In contrast, artifact-centric process modeling notations, like the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM), are better suited for this kind of scenarios: they define a process in terms of acceptable states and do not enforce any specific execution flow. This improves flexibility, but hampers the clarity of the defined models. The goal of this paper is to show how an extension of GSM, i.e., E-GSM, can be used to detect deviations from the execution path as modeled in BPMN, while keeping the process execution alive

Design hydrograph and routing scheme for flood mapping in a dense urban area

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Designing secure business processes for blockchains with SecBPMN2BC

Collaborative business processes can be seen as smart contracts, as they are oftentimes adopted to express agreements among different organizations. Indeed, they provide mechanisms to formalize the obligations of each involved party. For instance, collaborative business processes can specify when a certain task should be executed, under which conditions a service should be offered to the other participants, and how physical objects and information should be manipulated. In this setting, to prevent misuse of smart contracts and services and information provided, it is paramount to guarantee by design that security requirements are fulfilled. With the rise in popularity of blockchains, several approaches exploiting the trusted smart contract execution environment offered by this technology to enforce collaborative business processes have been proposed. Yet, the complexity of business processes, security requirements, and blockchain applications calls for an engineering approach that guides the design of secure business processes. Such an approach should both take advantage of the possibilities offered by blockchain technology to enforce some security requirements (e.g., non-repudiation), and take into account the limitations blockchain poses for other security requirements (e.g., confidentiality). However, we are not aware of any existing work that aims at addressing such issues following a similar approach. In this article, we propose SecBPMN2BC: a model-driven approach to designing business processes with security requirements that are meant to be deployed on blockchains. SecBPMN2BC consists of: (i) an extension of BPMN 2.0 that allows designing secure smart contracts; (ii) a set of algorithms and their implementation that check incompatible security requirements and help the design of smart contracts; (iii) a workflow that guides the application of the method. The method has been validated with a survey conducted on security and BPMN experts

Artifact-driven Process Monitoring: Dynamically Binding Real-world Objects to Running Processes

Monitoring inter-organizational business processes requires explicit knowledge about when activities start and complete. This is a challenge because no single system controls the process, activities might not be directly recorded, and the overall course of execution might only be determined at runtime. In this paper, we address these problems by integrating process monitoring with sensor data from real-world objects. We formalize our approach using the E-GSM artifact-centric language. Since the association between real-world objects and process instances is often only determined at runtime, our approach also caters for dynamic binding and unbinding at runtime

mArtifact: an Artifact-driven Process Monitoring Platform

Traditionally, human intervention is required to monitor a business process. Operators notify when manual activities are executed, and manually restart the monitoring whenever the process is not executed as expected. This paper presents mArtifact, an artifact-driven process monitoring platform. mArtifact uses the E-GSM artifact-centric language to represent the process. This way, when a violation occurs, it can flag the affected activities without halting the monitoring. By predicating on the conditions of the physical artifacts participating in a process, mArtifact autonomously detects when activities are executed and constraints are violated. The audience is expected to be familiar with business process monitoring and artifact-centric modeling languages