Towards the Control and Prevention of Waste in IT Service Operation Using Fuzzy Logic: Focus in Incident Management Process

All production lines are continuously confronted with the phenomenon of waste, especially in IT operations. A waste is assessed in terms of the required resources and the cost employed to solve the problem behind it. Eliminating the waste in daily operations is essential to improve IT service management. This article aims to provide an estimation of the level of potential waste, where waste generation trends are provoked by the activities of IT service management processes. We are going to focus particularly on the possibility of applying a Lean improvement process to IT services processes when using fuzzy logic method. We specifically demonstrate our contribution through the application of fuzzy analysis to the incident management process. This approach also aims at developing a theoretical and pragmatic model and promoting the knowledge of IT experts. In order to make our framework as generic as possible, concepts of IT operations, including the incident management, are inspired by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), the most prominent framework for IT service governance according to the current literature

A BPMN-Based Design and Maintenance Framework for ETL Processes

Business Intelligence (BI) applications require the design, implementation, and maintenance of processes that extract, transform, and load suitable data for analysis. The development of these processes (known as ETL) is an inherently complex problem that is typically costly and time consuming. In a previous work, we have proposed a vendor-independent language for reducing the design complexity due to disparate ETL languages tailored to specific design tools with steep learning curves. Nevertheless, the designer still faces two major issues during the development of ETL processes: (i) how to implement the designed processes in an executable language, and (ii) how to maintain the implementation when the organization data infrastructure evolves. In this paper, we propose a model-driven framework that provides automatic code generation capability and ameliorate maintenance support of our ETL language. We present a set of model-to-text transformations able to produce code for different ETL commercial tools as well as model-to-model transformations that automatically update the ETL models with the aim of supporting the maintenance of the generated code according to data source evolution. A demonstration using an example is conducted as an initial validation to show that the framework covering modeling, code generation and maintenance could be used in practice

A BPMN-based conceptual language for designing ETL processes

Business Intelligence (BI) is the set of techniques and technologies that support the decision-making process by providing an aggregated insight on data in the organization. Due to the numerous potentially useful data hold by the events and applications running in the organization, the BI market calls for new technologies able to suitably exploit it for analysis wherever it is available. In particular, the Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) processes, the fundamental BI technology responsible for integrating and cleansing organization data, must respond to these requirements.However, the development of ETL processes is still considered to be very complex and time-consuming, to such a point that roughly 80% of the BI project effort is dedicated to the ETL development. Among the phases of ETL development life cycle, ETL modeling is a critical and laborious task. Actually, this phase producesthe first effective formal representation of the ETL process, i.e. ETL model, that is completely reused and refined in the subsequent phases of the development.Typically, the ETL processes are modeled using vendor-specific ETL tools from the very beginning of development. However, these tools are unsuitable for business users since they induce overwhelming fine-grained models.As an attempt to provide more appropriate tools to business users, vendor-independent ETL modeling languages have been proposed in the literature. Nevertheless, they still remain immature. In order to get a precise view on these languages, we conduct a survey which: i) defines a set of criteria associated to major ETLrequirements identified in the literature; ii) compares the surveyed conceptual languages, issued from research work, to the physical languages, issued from prominent ETL tools; and iii) studies the whole methodologies of ETL development associatedto these modeling languages.The analysis of our survey reveals several drawbacks in responding to the ETL requirements. Particularly, the conceptual languages have incomplete elements for ETL modeling with few or no formalization. Several languages are only descriptive with no ability to be automatically implemented into executable code, nor are they able to be automatically maintained according to changes over time.To address these shortcomings, we present, in this thesis, a novel approach that tackles the whole development life cycle of ETL processes. First, we propose a new vendor-independent language aiming at modeling ETL processes similar to typical business processes, the processes responsible for managing the operations in an organization. The rational behind this proposal is to provide ETL processes with better access to data in events and applications of the organization, including fresh data, and better design capabilities such as available analysis for any users. By using the standard representation mechanism denoted BPMN (Business Process Modeling and Notation) and a classification of ETL elements resulting from a study of the most used commercial and open source ETL tools, the language enables building agile and full-edged ETL processes. We name our language BPMN4ETL to refer to BPMN for ETL processes.Second, we build a model-driven framework that provides automatic code generation capability and ameliorates maintenance support of our ETL language. We use the Model-Driven Development (MDD) technology as it helps in developing software, particularly in automating the transformation from one phase of the software development to another. We present a set of model-to-text transformations able to produce code for different business process engines and ETL engines. Also, we depict the model-to-model transformations that automatically update the ETL models with the aim of supporting the maintenance of the generated code according to data source evolution. A demonstration using a case study is conducted as an initial validation to show that the framework covering modeling, implementation and maintenance could be used in practice. To illustrate new concepts introduced in the thesis, mainly the BPMN4ETL language, and the implementation and maintenance framework, we use a case study from the fictitious Northwind Traders company, a retailer company that imports and exports foods from around the world.Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieurinfo:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe

Defining ETL worfklows using BPMN and BPEL

DOLAP 2009info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

A model-driven framework for ETL process development

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

BPMN-based conceptual modeling of ETL processes

Business Intelligence (BI) solutions require the design and implementation of complex processes (denoted ETL) that extract, transform, and load data from the sources to a common repository. New applications, like for example, real-time data warehousing, require agile and flexible tools that allow BI users to take timely decisions based on extremely up-to-date data. This calls for new ETL tools able to adapt to constant changes and quickly produce and modify executable code. A way to achieve this is to make ETL processes become aware of the business processes in the organization, in order to easily identify which data are required, and when and how to load them in the data warehouse. Therefore, we propose to model ETL processes using the standard representation mechanism denoted BPMN (Business Process Modeling and Notation). In this paper we present a BPMN-based metamodel for conceptual modeling of ETL processes. This metamodel is based on a classification of ETL objects resulting from a study of the most used commercial and open source ETL tools. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.SCOPUS: cp.kinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedIn Alfredo Cuzzocrea and Umeshwar Dayal, editors, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery, DaWaK 2012. Springer-Verlag, Vienna, Austri