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

ADEPT2 - Next Generation Process Management Technology

If current process management systems shall be applied to a broad spectrum of applications, they will have to be significantly improved with respect to their technological capabilities. In particular, in dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement and deploy new processes, to enable ad-hoc modifications of single process instances at runtime (e.g., to add, delete or shift process steps), and to support process schema evolution with instance migration, i.e., to propagate process schema changes to already running instances. These requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and by preserving the robustness of the process management system. In this paper we describe how these challenges have been addressed and solved in the ADEPT2 Process Management System. Our overall vision is to provide a next generation process management technology which can be used in a variety of application domains

ADEPT2 – Ein adaptives Prozess-Management-System der nächsten Generation.

Prozess-Management-Systeme müssen gegenüber dem heutigen Stand der Technik erheblich leistungsfähiger werden, um für ein wirklich breites Anwendungsspektrum einsetzbar zu sein: Neue Prozesse müssen sehr viel rascher implementierbar sein, zur Laufzeit müssen bei Bedarf Ad-hoc-Abweichungen vom modellierten Prozessschema unterstützt werden und bei Änderungen am Prozessschema selbst, müssen die bereits laufenden Prozessinstanzen – falls erforderlich – systemseitig auf das neue Schema migriert werden können; und dies alles unter systemseitiger Zusicherung von Konsistenz und Robustheit der (weiteren) Prozessausführung. Der Beitrag beschreibt, wie diese Herausforderungen und Probleme im ADEPT2-System adressiert bzw. gelöst werden

Semantic Correctness in Adaptive Process Management Systems

Abstract. Adaptivity in Process Management Systems (PMS) is key to their successful applicability in pratice. Approaches have already been de-veloped to ensure the system correctness after arbitrary process changes at the syntactical level. However, still errors may be caused at the se-mantical level. Therefore, the integration of application knowledge will flag a milestone in the development of process management technology. In this paper, we introduce a framework for defining semantic constraints over processes in such a way that they can express real-world applica-tion knowledge. On the other hand, these constraints are still manageable concerning the effort for maintenance and semantic process verification. This can be used, for example, to detect semantic conflicts when ap-plying process changes (e.g., drug incompatibilities). In order to enable the PMS to deal with such semantic conflicts we also introduce a notion of semantic correctness and discuss how to (efficiently) verify semantic correctness in the context of process changes

Disjoint and Overlapping Process Changes: Challenges, Solutions, Applications

Adaptive process–aware information systems must be able to support ad–hoc changes of single process instances as well as schema modifications at the process type level and their propagation to a collection of related process instances. So far these two kinds of (dynamic) process changes have been mainly considered in an isolated fashion. Especially for long-running processes, however, it must be possible to adequately handle the interplay between type and instance changes as well. One challenge in this context is to determine whether concurrent process type and process instance changes have the same or overlapping effects on the original process schema or not. Information about the degree of overlap is needed, for example, to determine whether and – if yes – how a process type change can be propagated to individually modified process instances as well. This paper provides a formal framework for dealing with overlapping and disjoint process changes and presents adequate migration strategies depending on the particular degree of overlap. In order to obtain a canonical representation of changes an algorithm is introduced which purges change logs from noisy information. Finally, a powerful proof-of-concept prototype exists

On the Common Support of Workflow Type and Instance Changes under Correctness Constraints

The capability to rapidly adapt in-progress workflows (WF) is an essential requirement for any workflow system. Adaptations may concern single WF instances or a WF type as a whole. Especially for long-running business processes it is indispensable to propagate WF type changes to in-progress WF instances as well. Very challenging in this context is to correctly adapt a (potentially large) collection of WF instances, which may be in different states and to which various ad-hoc changes may have been previously applied. This paper presents a generic framework for the common support of both WF type and WF instance changes. We establish fundamental correctness principles, position formal theorems, and show how WF instances can be automatically and efficiently migrated to a modified WF schema. The adequate treatment of conflicting WF type and WF instance changes adds to the overall completeness of our approach. By offering more flexibility and adaptability the so promising WF technology will finally deliver

Glycotope structures and intramolecular affinity factors of plant lectins for Tn/T antigens

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Towards Compliance of Cross-Organizational Processes and their Changes

Businesses require the ability to rapidly implement new processes and to quickly adapt existing ones to environmental changes including the optimization of their interactions with partners and customers. However, changes of either intra- or cross-organizational processes must not be done in an uncontrolled manner. In particular, processes are increasingly subject to compliance rules that usually stem from security constraints, corporate guidelines, standards, and laws. These compliance rules have to be considered when modeling business processes and changing existing ones. While change and compliance have been extensively discussed for intra-organizational business processes, albeit only in an isolated manner, their combination in the context of cross-organizational processes remains an open issue. In this paper, we discuss requirements and challenges to be tackled in order to ensure that changes of cross-organizational business processes preserve compliance with imposed regulations, standards and laws

Design and Verification of Instantiable Compliance Rule Graphs in Process-Aware Information Systems

Abstract. For enterprises it has become crucial to check compliance of their business processes with certain rules such as medical guidelines or financial regulations. When automating compliance checks on pro-cess models, existing approaches have mainly addressed process-specific compliance rules so far, i.e., rules that correspond to a particular pro-cess model. However, in practice, we will rather find process-independent compliance rules that are nevertheless to be checked over process models. Thus, in this paper, we present an approach that enables the instantiation and verification of process-independent compliance rules over process models using domain models. For this, we provide an intuitive visualiza-tion of compliance rules and compliance rule instances at user level and show how rules and instances can be formalized and verified at system level. The overall approach is validated by a pattern-based comparison to existing approaches and by means of a prototypical implementation.

Resilience Analysis of Service Oriented Collaboration Process Management systems

Collaborative business process management allows for the automated coordination of processes involving human and computer actors. In modern economies it is increasingly needed for this coordination to be not only within organizations but also to cross organizational boundaries. The dependence on the performance of other organizations should however be limited, and the control over the own processes is required from a competitiveness perspective. The main objective of this work is to propose an evaluation model for measuring a resilience of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) collaborative process management system. In this paper, we have proposed resilience analysis perspectives of SOA collaborative process systems, i.e. overall system perspective, individual process model perspective, individual process instance perspective, service perspective, and resource perspective. A collaborative incident and maintenance notification process system is reviewed for illustrating our resilience analysis. This research contributes to extend SOA collaborative business process management systems with resilience support, not only looking at quantification and identification of resilience factors, but also considering ways of improving the resilience of SOA collaborative process systems through measures at design and run-time