Droplet deformation by short laser-induced pressure pulses

When a free-falling liquid droplet is hit by a laser it experiences a strong ablation driven pressure pulse. Here we study the resulting droplet deformation in the regime where the ablation pressure duration is short, i.e. comparable to the time scale on which pressure waves travel through the droplet. To this end an acoustic analytic model for the pressure-, pressure impulse- and velocity fields inside the droplet is developed in the limit of small density fluctuations. This model is used to examine how the droplet deformation depends on the pressure pulse duration while the total momentum to the droplet is kept constant. Within the limits of this analytic model, we demonstrate that when the total momentum transferred to the droplet is small the droplet shape-evolution is indistinguishable from an incompressible droplet deformation. However, when the momentum transfer is increased the droplet response is strongly affected by the pulse duration. In this later regime, compressed flow regimes alter the droplet shape evolution considerably.Comment: Submitted to JF

How to make process model matching work better? An analysis of current similarity measures

Process model matching techniques aim at automatically identifying activity correspondences between two process models that represent the same or similar behavior. By doing so, they provide essential input for many advanced process model analysis techniques such as process model search. Despite their importance, the performance of process model matching techniques is not yet convincing and several attempts to improve the performance have not been successful. This raises the question of whether it is really not possible to further improve the performance of process model matching techniques. In this paper, we aim to answer this question by conducting two consecutive analyses. First, we review existing process model matching techniques and give an overview of the specific technologies they use to identify similar activities. Second, we analyze the correspondences of the Process Model Matching Contest 2015 and reflect on the suitability of the identified technologies to identify the missing correspondences. As a result of these analyses, we present a list of three specific recommendations to improve the performance of process model matching techniques in the future.</p

Best practices in business process redesign: Use and impact

Purpose - This paper seeks to provide business process redesign (BPR) practitioners and academics with insight into the most popular heuristics to derive improved process designs. Design/methodology/approach - An online survey was carried out in the years 2003-2004 among a wide range of experienced BPR practitioners in the UK and The Netherlands. Findings - The survey indicates that this top ten of best practices is indeed extensively used in practice. Moreover, indications for their business impact have been collected and classified. Research limitations/implications - The authors\u27 estimations of best practices effectiveness differed from feedback obtained from respondents, possibly caused by the design of the survey instrument. This is food for further research. Practical implications - The presented framework can be used by practitioners to keep the various aspects of a redesign in perspective. The presented list of BPR best practices is directly applicable to derive new process designs. Originality/value - This paper addresses the subject of process redesign, rather than the more popular subject of process reengineering. As such, it fills in part an existing gap in knowledge. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

On the automatic labeling of process models

Process models are essential tools for managing, understanding and changing business processes. Yet, from a user perspective they can quickly become too complex to deal with. Abstraction – aggregating detailed fragments into more coarse-grained ones – has proven to be a valuable technique to simplify the view on a process model. Various techniques that automate the decision of which model fragments to aggregate have been defined and validated by recent research, but their application is hampered by the lack of abilities to generate meaningful names for such aggregated parts. In this paper, we address this problem by investigating naming strategies for individual model fragments and process models as a whole. Our contribution is an automatic naming approach that builds on the linguistic analysis of process models from industry

Best practices in business process redesign: Use and impact

Purpose - This paper seeks to provide business process redesign (BPR) practitioners and academics with insight into the most popular heuristics to derive improved process designs. Design/methodology/approach - An online survey was carried out in the years 2003-2004 among a wide range of experienced BPR practitioners in the UK and The Netherlands. Findings - The survey indicates that this top ten of best practices is indeed extensively used in practice. Moreover, indications for their business impact have been collected and classified. Research limitations/implications - The authors\u27 estimations of best practices effectiveness differed from feedback obtained from respondents, possibly caused by the design of the survey instrument. This is food for further research. Practical implications - The presented framework can be used by practitioners to keep the various aspects of a redesign in perspective. The presented list of BPR best practices is directly applicable to derive new process designs. Originality/value - This paper addresses the subject of process redesign, rather than the more popular subject of process reengineering. As such, it fills in part an existing gap in knowledge. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Refactoring Process Models in Large Process Repositories.

With the increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAIS), large process model repositories have emerged. Over time respective models have to be re-aligned to the real-world business processes through customization or adaptation. This bears the risk that model redundancies are introduced and complexity is increased. If no continuous investment is made in keeping models simple, changes are becoming increasingly costly and error-prone. Though refactoring techniques are widely used in software engineering to address related problems, this does not yet constitute state-of-the art in business process management. Process designers either have to refactor process models by hand or cannot apply respective techniques at all. This paper proposes a set of behaviour-preserving techniques for refactoring large process repositories. This enables process designers to eectively deal with model complexity by making process models better understandable and easier to maintain

Trade-offs in the performance of workflows - quantifying the impact of best practices

Business process redesign is one of the most powerful ways to boost business performance and to improve customer satisfaction [14]. A possible approach to business process redesign is using redesign best practices. A previous study identified a set of 29 different redesign best practices [18]. However, little is known about the exact impact of these redesign best practices on workflow performance. This study proposes an approach that can be used to quantify the impact of a business process redesign project on all dimensions of workflow performance. The approach consists of a large set of performance measures and a simulation toolkit. It supports the quantification of the impact of the implementation of redesign best practices, in order to determine what best practice or combination of best practices leads to the most favorable effect in a specific business process. The approach is developed based on a quantification project for the parallel best practice [8] and is validated with two other quantification projects, namely for the knockout and triage best practices

BPR best practices for the healthcare domain

Healthcare providers are under pressure to work more efficiently and in a more patient-focused way. One possible way to achieve this is to launch Business Process Redesign (BPR) initiatives, which focus on changing the structure of the involved processes and using IT as an enabler for such changes. In this paper, we argue that a list of historically successful improvement tactics, the BPR best practices, are a highly suitable ingredient for such efforts in the healthcare domain. Our assessment is based on the analysis of 14 case studies. The insights obtained by the analysis also led to an extension of the original set of best practices

Towards a methodology for the engineering of event-driven process applications

Successful applications of the Internet of Things such as smart cities, smart logistics, and predictive maintenance, build on observing and analyzing business-related objects in the real world for business process execution and monitoring. In this context, complex event processing is increasingly used to integrate events from sensors with events stemming from business process management systems. This paper describes a methodology to combine the areas and engineer an event-driven logistics processes application. Thereby, we describe the requirements, use cases and lessons learned to design and implement such an architecture