A meta-model based approach to the description of resources and skills

The management of intra- and inter-organizational business processes is a significant issue that influences company’s success. Many business processes are not fully automated and require human interaction. Therefore, responsibilities for tasks have to be assigned by workflow management systems. Common resource models allow the selection of resources according to their roles, thus neglecting competences and skills. In this article we present an extensible resource meta-model that allows the modeling of resources including their competences, skills and knowledge. Furthermore we propose the usage of these criteria to enable a more flexible assignment of resources to tasks. In particular our approach fosters the alignment of business process modeling and human resource planning. This combination facilitates several opportunities on both sides and offers potential for enhanced scheduling of adequate resources in comparison to pure role based decisions

LS3: Latent Semantic Analysis-based Similarity Search for Process Models

Large process model collections in use today contain hundreds or even thousands of conceptual process models. Search functionalities can help in handling such large collections for purposes such as duplicate detection or reuse of models. One popular stream of search functionalities is similarity-based search which utilizes similarity measures for finding similar models in a large collection. Most of these approaches base on an underlying alignment between the activities of the compared process models. Yet, such an alignment seems to be quite difficult to achieve according to the results of the Process Model Matching contests conducted in recent years. Therefore, the Latent Semantic Analysis-based Similarity Search (LS3) technique presented in this article does not rely on such an alignment, but uses a Latent Semantic Analysis-based similarity measure for retrieving similar models. An evaluation with 138 real-life process models shows a strong performance in terms of Precision, Recall, F-Measure, R-Precision and Precision-at-k, thereby outperforming five other techniques for similarity-based search. Additionally, the run time of the LS3 query calculation is significantly faster than any of the other approaches

Integrating sustainability into day-to-day business: a tacticalmanagement dashboard for O-LCA

In order to respond to the challenge of sustainable development, organizations need to manage the social, environmental and economic impacts of their activities. Existing approaches to manage organizational sustainability either are limited by a narrow perspective or lack concepts and tools to integrate sustainability considerations into day-to-day business. We address this issue by proposing a tactical management dashboard based on Organizational Life Cycle Assessment (O-LCA), an authoritative and comprehensive methodology for organizational sustainability analysis.We have developed a concept for a tactical sustainability management dashboard based on O-LCA guidelines and best-practices for dashboard design that allows managers (who may not be LCA experts) to explore, analyze and interpret O-LCA study results. The concept was implemented in an early software prototype and evaluated regarding its usability. Our concept and prototype show the viability and utility of a management tool based on O-LCA

Innovative Informatikanwendungen : Informatik 2003 ; 29. September - 2. Oktober 2003 in Frankfurt am Main

Tagungsprogramm INFORMATIK 2003 Innovative Informatikanwendungen. 33. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI) 29. September bis 2. Oktober 2003 Frankfurt am Mai

10151 Abstracts Collection -- Enabling Holistic Approaches to Business Process Lifecycle Management

From 11.04. to 16.04.2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10151 ``Enabling Holistic Approaches to Business Process Lifecycle Management \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Pathways to Greener Pastures: Research Opportunities to Integrate Life Cycle Assessment and Sustainable Business Process Management Based on a Systematic Tertiary Literature Review

Sustainable Business Process Management (BPM) is a research field that aims to improve the sustainability performance of organizations’ operations. With its focus on business processes, it has the potential to bring sustainability considerations from external reporting to the core of organizations. We present a systematic tertiary literature study to provide a catalog of existing literature reviews and primary work and to give a consolidated overview of the state and research needs of the field. We find that Sustainable BPM research has focused on modeling approaches and most of the work so far is largely conceptual, with a limited sustainability perspective. Based on these findings, we propose an integration of BPM and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), an established and rigorous method for sustainability analysis. We present research opportunities to show how both disciplines can synergize and leverage methods and techniques for business process automation and innovation to effectively improve the sustainability performance of organizations

TracyML - A Modeling Language for Social Impacts of Product Life Cycles

In order to analyse the impacts of production and consumption on social sustainability, Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) has emerged as an extensive and promising, yet still young methodology. S-LCA captures the whole life cycle of a product and aims to include all relevant affected stakeholders. It therefore requires large amounts of data and produces likewise complex results, which makes the presentation of findings challenging. We argue that conceptual models make the complexity of S-LCA study results easier to handle. In particular, Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSML) support users in structuring and communicating a complex problem domain. This paper presents TracyML, a DSML which provides transparency of social impacts associated with a product’s life cycle. Special emphasis has been laid on the graphical notation and understandability of the resulting models. We have evaluated the utility of TracyML by performing interviews with domain experts

A Formal Specification of the Horus Modeling Language Using FDMM

In this paper we show how a modeling language from the area of business process engineering can be formally specified using meta modeling concepts. This serves as a basis for the implementation on an industry-scale meta modeling platform. For this purpose we revert to the Horus modeling method and the FDMM formalism that has recently been introduced to formally describe meta models and models. Subsequently we report on the implementation of the modeling language on the ADOxx meta modeling platform and discuss the lessons learned by the application of this approach