Process and Data: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Companies increasingly adopt process management technology which offers promising perspectives for realizing flexible information systems. However, there still exist numerous process scenarios not adequately covered by contemporary information systems. One major reason for this deficiency is the insufficient understanding of the inherent relationships existing between business processes on one side and business data on the other. Consequently, these two perspectives are not well integrated in many existing process management systems. This paper emphasizes the need for both object- and process-awareness in future information systems, and illustrates it along several examples. Especially, the relation between these two fundamental perspectives will be discussed, and the role of business objects and data as drivers for both process modeling and process enactment be emphasized. In general, any business process support should consider object behavior as well as object interactions, and therefore be based on two levels of granularity. In addition, data-driven process execution and integrated user access to processes and data are needed. Besides giving insights into these fundamental characteristics, an advanced framework supporting them in an integrated manner will be presented and its application to real-world process scenarios be shown. Overall, a holistic and generic framework integrating processes, data, and users will contribute to overcome many of the limitations of existing process management technology

Engineering a Highly Scalable Object-aware Process Management Engine Using Distributed Microservices

Scalability of information systems has been a research topic for many years and is as relevant as ever with the dramatic increases in digitization of business processes and data. This also applies to process-aware information systems, most of which are currently incapable of scaling horizontally, i.e., over multiple servers. This paper presents the design science artifact that resulted from engineering a highly scalable process management system relying on the object-aware process man-agement paradigm. The latter allows for distributed process execution by conceptually encapsulating process logic and data into multiple in-teracting objects that may be processed concurrently. These objects, in turn, are represented by individual microservices at run-time, which can be hosted transparently across entire server clusters. We present mea-surement data that evaluates the scalability of the artifact on a compute cluster, demonstrating that the current prototypical implementation of the run-time engine can handle very large numbers of users and process instances concurrently in single-case mechanism experiments with large amounts of simulated user input. Finally, the development of scalable process execution engines will further the continued maturation of the data-centric business process management field

Axially Symmetric Bianchi I Yang-Mills Cosmology as a Dynamical System

We construct the most general form of axially symmetric SU(2)-Yang-Mills fields in Bianchi cosmologies. The dynamical evolution of axially symmetric YM fields in Bianchi I model is compared with the dynamical evolution of the electromagnetic field in Bianchi I and the fully isotropic YM field in Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmologies. The stochastic properties of axially symmetric Bianchi I-Einstein-Yang-Mills systems are compared with those of axially symmetric YM fields in flat space. After numerical computation of Liapunov exponents in synchronous (cosmological) time, it is shown that the Bianchi I-EYM system has milder stochastic properties than the corresponding flat YM system. The Liapunov exponent is non-vanishing in conformal time.Comment: 18 pages, 6 Postscript figures, uses amsmath,amssymb,epsfig,verbatim, to appear in CQ

Defining and Analysing Resource Assignments in Business Processes with RAL

Business process (BP) modelling notations tend to stray their attention from (human) resource management, unlike other aspects such as control flow or even data flow. They not only offer little intuitive languages to assign resources to BP activities, but neither link BPs with the structure of the organization where they are used, so BP models can easily contain errors such as the assignment of resources that do not belong to the organizational model. In this paper we address this problem and define RAL (Resource Assignment Language), a domainspecific language explicitly developed to assign resources to the activities of a BP model. RAL makes BPs aware of organizational structures. Besides, RAL semantics is based on an OWL-DL ontology, which enables the automatic analysis of resource assignment expressions, thus allowing the extraction of information from the resource assignments, and the detection of inconsistencies and assignment conflicts

Automatically Generating and Updating User Interface Components in Process-Aware Information Systems

The increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAISs) has resulted in a large number of implemented business processes. To react on changing needs, companies need to be able to quickly adapt these process implementations. Current PAISs only provide mechanisms to evolve the schema of a process, but do not support the automated creation and adaptation of user interfaces (UIs). The latter may have a complex logic and comprise conditional elements or database queries. Creating and evolving UIs manually is a tedious and error-prone task. This paper introduces a set of patterns for transforming fragments of a business process, whose activities are performed by the same user role, to UIs of the PAIS. In particular, UI logic can be expressed using the same notation as for process modeling. Furthermore, a transformation method is introduced, which applies these patterns to automatically derive UIs by establishing a bidirectional mapping between process model and UI. This mapping allows propagating UI changes to the process model and vice versa. Overall, our approach enables process designers to rapidly develop and update complex UIs in PAISs

Sequences of Einstein-Yang-Mills-Dilaton Black Holes

Einstein-Yang-Mills-dilaton theory possesses sequences of neutral static spherically symmetric black hole solutions. The solutions depend on the dilaton coupling constant $\gamma$ and on the horizon. The SU(2) solutions are labelled by the number of nodes $n$ of the single gauge field function, whereas the SO(3) solutions are labelled by the nodes $(n_1,n_2)$ of both gauge field functions. The SO(3) solutions form sequences characterized by the node structure $(j,j+n)$, where $j$ is fixed. The sequences of magnetically neutral solutions tend to magnetically charged limiting solutions. For finite $j$ the SO(3) sequences tend to magnetically charged Einstein-Yang-Mills-dilaton solutions with $j$ nodes and charge $P=\sqrt{3}$. For $j=0$ and $j \rightarrow \infty$ the SO(3) sequences tend to Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton solutions with magnetic charges $P=\sqrt{3}$ and $P=2$, respectively. The latter also represent the scaled limiting solutions of the SU(2) sequence. The convergence of the global properties of the black hole solutions, such as mass, dilaton charge and Hawking temperature, is exponential. The degree of convergence of the matter and metric functions of the black hole solutions is related to the relative location of the horizon to the nodes of the corresponding regular solutions.Comment: 71 pages, Latex2e, 29 ps-figures include

Spin operator and spin states in Galilean covariant Fermi field theories

Spin degrees of freedom of the Galilean covariant Dirac field in (4+1) dimensions and its nonrelativistic counterpart in (3+1) dimensions are examined. Two standard choices of spin operator, the Galilean covariant and Dirac spin operators, are considered. It is shown that the Dirac spin of the Galilean covariant Dirac field in (4+1) dimensions is not conserved, and the role of non-Galilean boosts in its nonconservation is stressed out. After reduction to (3+1) dimensions the Dirac field turns into a nonrelativistic Fermi field with a conserved Dirac spin. A generalized form of the Levy-Leblond equations for the Fermi field is given. One-particle spin states are constructed. A particle-antiparticle system is discussed.Comment: Minor corrections in the text; journal versio

Sequences of globally regular and black hole solutions in SU(4) Einstein-Yang-Mills theory

SU(4) Einstein-Yang-Mills theory possesses sequences of static spherically symmetric globally regular and black hole solutions. Considering solutions with a purely magnetic gauge field, based on the 4-dimensional embedding of $su(2)$ in $su(4)$, these solutions are labelled by the node numbers $(n_1,n_2,n_3)$ of the three gauge field functions $u_1$, $u_2$ and $u_3$. We classify the various types of solutions in sequences and determine their limiting solutions. The limiting solutions of the sequences of neutral solutions carry charge, and the limiting solutions of the sequences of charged solutions carry higher charge. For sequences of black hole solutions with node structure $(n,j,n)$ and $(n,n,n)$, several distinct branches of solutions exist up to critical values of the horizon radius. We determine the critical behaviour for these sequences of solutions. We also consider SU(4) Einstein-Yang-Mills-dilaton theory and show that these sequences of solutions are analogous in most respects to the corresponding SU(4) Einstein-Yang-Mills sequences of solutions.Comment: 40 pages, 5 tables, 19 Postscript figures, use revtex.st

The Relational Process Structure

Using data-centric process paradigms, small processes such as artifacts, object lifecycles, or Proclets have become an alternative to large, monolithic models. In these paradigms, a business process arises from the interactions between small processes. However, many-to-many relationships may exist between different process types, requiring careful consideration to ensure that the interactions between processes can be purposefully coordinated. Although several concepts exist for modeling interrelated processes, a concept that considers both many-to-many relationships and cardinality constraints is missing. Furthermore, existing concepts focus on design-time, neglecting the complexity introduced by many-to-many relationships when enacting extensive process structures at run-time. The knowledge which process instances are related to which other process instances is essential. This paper proposes the relational process structure, a concept providing full support for many-to-many-relationships and cardinality constraints at both design- and run-time. The relational process structure represents a cornerstone to the proper coordination of interrelated processes

Using the guard-stage-milestone notation for monitoring BPMN-based processes

Business processes are usually designed by means of imperative languages to model the acceptable execution of the activities performed within a system or an organization. At the same time, declarative languages are better suited to check the conformance of the states and transitions of the modeled process with respect to its actual execution. To avoid defining models twice from scratch to cope with both the process enactment and its monitoring, this paper proposes an approach for translating BPMN process models to E-GSM ones: an extension of the Guard-Stage-Milestone artifact-centric notation. The paper also shows how a monitoring engine based on E-GSM specifications can detect anomalies during the execution of the process and classify them according to different levels of severity, that is, with respect to the impact on the outcome of the process