Translating standard process models to BPEL

Standardisation of languages in the field of business process management has long been an elusive goal. Recently though, consensus has built around one process implementation language, namely BPEL, and two fundamentally similar process modelling notations, namely UML Activity Diagram (UML AD) and BPMN. This paper presents a technique for generating BPEL code from process models expressed in a core subset of BPMN and UML AD. This model-to-code translation is a necessary ingredient to the emergence of model-driven business process development environments based on these standards. The proposed translation has been implemented as an open source tool

Enhancing workflow-nets with data for trace completion

The growing adoption of IT-systems for modeling and executing (business) processes or services has thrust the scientific investigation towards techniques and tools which support more complex forms of process analysis. Many of them, such as conformance checking, process alignment, mining and enhancement, rely on complete observation of past (tracked and logged) executions. In many real cases, however, the lack of human or IT-support on all the steps of process execution, as well as information hiding and abstraction of model and data, result in incomplete log information of both data and activities. This paper tackles the issue of automatically repairing traces with missing information by notably considering not only activities but also data manipulated by them. Our technique recasts such a problem in a reachability problem and provides an encoding in an action language which allows to virtually use any state-of-the-art planning to return solutions

Enabling Personalized Process Schedules with Time-aware Process Views

Companies increasingly adopt process-aware information systems (PAISs) to model, enact, monitor, and evolve their business processes. Although the proper handling of temporal constraints (e.g., deadlines and minimum time lags between activities) is crucial for many application domains, existing PAISs vary significantly regarding the support of the temporal perspective of a business process. In previous work, we introduced characteristic time patterns for specifying the temporal perspective of PAISs. However, time-aware process schemas might be complex and hard to understand for end-users. To enable their proper visualization, therefore, this paper introduces an approach for transforming time-aware process schemas into enhanced Gantt charts. Based on this, a method for creating personalized process schedules using process views is suggested. Overall, the presented approach enables users to easily understand and monitor time-aware processes in PAISs

Adaptive Process Management in Highly Dynamic and Pervasive Scenarios

Process Management Systems (PMSs) are currently more and more used as a supporting tool for cooperative processes in pervasive and highly dynamic situations, such as emergency situations, pervasive healthcare or domotics/home automation. But in all such situations, designed processes can be easily invalidated since the execution environment may change continuously due to frequent unforeseeable events. This paper aims at illustrating the theoretical framework and the concrete implementation of SmartPM, a PMS that features a set of sound and complete techniques to automatically cope with unplanned exceptions. PMS SmartPM is based on a general framework which adopts the Situation Calculus and Indigolog

The Repercussions of Business Process Modeling Notations on Mental Load and Mental Effort

Over the last decade, plenty business process modeling notations emerged for the documentation of business processes in enterprises. During the learning of a modeling notation, an individual is confronted with a cognitive load that has an impact on the comprehension of a notation with its underlying formalisms and concepts. To address the cognitive load, this paper presents the results from an exploratory study, in which a sample of 94 participants, divided into novices, intermediates, and experts, needed to assess process models expressed in terms of eight different process modeling notations, i.e., BPMN 2.0, Declarative Process Modeling, eGantt Charts, EPCs, Flow Charts, IDEF3, Petri Nets, and UML Activity Diagrams. The study focus was set on the subjective comprehensibility and accessibility of process models reflecting participant's cognitive load (i.e., mental load and mental effort). Based on the cognitive load, a factor reflecting the mental difficulty for comprehending process models in different modeling notations was derived. The results indicate that established modeling notations from industry (e.g., BPMN) should be the first choice for enterprises when striving for process management. Moreover, study insights may be used to determine which modeling notations should be taught for an introduction in process modeling or which notation is useful to teach and train process modelers or analysts. \keywords{Business Process Modeling Notations, Cognitive Load, Mental Load, Mental Effort, Human-centered Desig

Service Interaction Flow Analysis Technique for Service Personalization

Abstract Service interaction flows are difficult to capture, analyze, outline, and represent for research and design purposes. We examine how variation of personalized service flows in technology-mediated service interaction can be modeled and analyzed to provide information on how service personalization could support interaction. We have analyzed service interaction cases in a context of technology-mediated car rental service. With the analysis technique we propose, inspired by Interaction Analysis method, we were able to capture and model the situational service interaction. Our contribution regarding technology-mediated service interaction design is twofold: First, with the increased understanding on the role of personalization in managing variation in technology-mediated service interaction, our study contributes to designing service management information systems and human-computer interfaces that support personalized service interaction flows. Second, we provide a new analysis technique for situated interaction analysis, particularly when the aim is to understand personalization in service interaction flows

Using Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience to Investigate the Effects of Event-Driven Process Chains on Process Model Comprehension

Business process models have been adopted by enterprises for more than a decade. Especially for domain experts, the comprehension of process models constitutes a challenging task that needs to be mastered when creating or reading these models. This paper presents the results we obtained from an eye tracking experiment on process model comprehension. In detail, individuals with either no or advanced expertise in process modeling were confronted with models expressed in terms of Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs), reflecting different levels of difficulty. The first results of this experiment confirm recent findings from one of our previous experiments on the reading and comprehension of process models. On one hand, independent from their level of exper-tise, all individuals face similar patterns, when being confronted with process models exceeding a certain level of difficulty. On the other, it appears that process models expressed in terms of EPCs are perceived differently compared to process models specified in the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). In the end, their generalization needs to be confirmed by additional empirical experiments. The presented expe-riment continues a series of experiments that aim to unravel the factors fostering the comprehension of business process models by using methods and theories stemming from the field of cognitive neuroscience and psychology