Exploring Human Resource Management in Crowdsourcing Platforms

The correct execution of process activities is usually responsibility of the employees (i.e., human resources) of an organisation. In the last years, notable support has been developed to make resource management in business processes more efficient and customisable. Recently, a new way of working has emerged and caught significant attention in the market: crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing consists of outsourcing activities in the form of an open call to an undefined network of people, i.e., the crowd. While in traditional resource management in business processes resources are known and task assignment is usually controlled, the workers in crowdsourcing platforms are unknown and are allowed to select the tasks they want to perform. These and other di↵erences between resource management in business processes and in crowdsourcing platforms have not been explicitly investigated so far. Taking as reference the existing mature work on resource management in business processes, this paper presents the results of a study on the existing support for resource management in crowdsourcing platforms.Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) 845638 (SHAPE

BRANCH: an ASP systems benchmark for resource allocation in business processes

The goal of BRANCH is to benchmark Answer Set Programming (ASP) systems to test their performance when dealing with the task of automatically allocating resources to business process activities. Like many other scheduling problems, the allocation of resources and starting times to process activities is a challenging optimization problem, yet it is a crucial step for an optimal execution of the processes. BRANCH has been designed as a configurable benchmark equipped with instance generators that produce problem instances of different size and hardness with respect to adjustable parameters. This application-oriented benchmark supports the BPM community to find the ASP systems and implementations that perform better in solving the resource allocation problem.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación RTI2018-100763-J-I0

A Benchmark for ASP Systems: Resource Allocation in Business Processes

The goal of this paper is to benchmark Answer Set Programming (ASP) systems to test their performance when dealing with a complex optimization problem. In particular, the problem tackled is resource allocation in the area of Business Process Management (BPM). Like many other scheduling problems, the allocation of resources and starting times to business process activities is a challenging optimization problem for ASP solvers. Our problem encoding is ASP Core-2 standard compliant and it is realized in a declarative and compact fashion. We develop an instance generator that produces problem instances of different size and hardness with respect to adjustable parameters. By using the baseline encoding and the instance generator, we provide a comparison between the two award-winning ASP solvers CLASP and WASP and report the grounding performance of GRINGO and I-DLV. The benchmark suggests that there is room for improvement concerning both the grounders and the solvers. Fostered by the relevance of the problem addressed, of which several variants have been described in different domains, we believe this is a solid application-oriented benchmark for the ASP community.Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) 845638 (SHAPE

RAL: a High-Level User-Oriented Resource Assignment Language for Business Processes

An important task of business process design is the definition of what and how members of an organization are involved in the activities of the business processes developed within it. in this paper we analyse the capabilities of BPMN 2.0, the de-facto standard for business process modelling, in this regard. The conclusion is that, although it provides some mechanisms to assign resources to business process activities, they present several drawbacks. On the one hand, it does not provide a clear way to relate the assignment of resources with a model of the structure of the organization. On the other hand, it relies on XPath as the default language to assign resources to activities. The consequence is that it has limitations regarding the expressiveness of resource assignment expressions. Furthermore, it makes resource assignment not easy to learn and use since XPath has not been designed for that purpose. To overcome these drawbacks we introduce RAL (Resource Assignment Language), a DSL based on a well-known organizational metamodel that can be used together with BPMN 2.0. RAL provides more expressiveness to the resource assignments and it uses a high-level sintaxis defined to be used by technically unskilled users

Exploring Features of a Full-Coverage Integrated Solution for Business Process Compliance

The last few years have seen the introduction of several techniques for automatically tackling some aspects of compliance checking between business processes and business rules. Some of them are quite robust and mature and are provided with software support that partially or fully implement them. However, as far as we know there is not yet a tool that provides for the complete management of business process compliance in the whole lifecycle of business processes. The goal of this paper is to move towards an integrated business process compliance management system (BPCMS) on the basis of current literature and existing support. For this purpose, we present a description of some compliance-related features such a system should have in order to provide full coverage of the business process lifecycle, from compliance aware business process design to the audit process. Hints about what existing approaches can fit in each feature and challenges for future work are also provided

Introducing a Mashup-Based Approach for Design-Time Compliance Checking in Business Processes

Business process compliance tries to ensure the business processes used in an organization are designed and executed according to the rules that govern the company. However, the nature of rules (expressed in natural language) and the large amount of elements that can be involved in them make their materialization and automated checking quite difficult. That is why the existing support for compliance checking is generally restricted to specific kinds of rules (e.g. rules affecting the control flow of the process). in this paper, we introduce compliance mashups, and show how a mashup-based approach can help solve the problem of rule specification and checking at design time. Some advantages of such an approach are that: (i) any kind of rule can be specified, which implies that each user can specify a rule according to his/her interpretation of the rule; (ii) building the compliance mashup is transparent to the formalism(s) used to implement it, so different techniques can be used together; and (iv) mashup components or parts of them can be re-used. As an example we use this approach to build mashups to specify and check rules related to human resource management in business processes at design time

Designing Business Processes with History-Aware Resource Assignments

Human resources are actively involved in business process management (BPM), due to their participation in the execution of the work developed within business process (BP) activities. They, thus, constitute a crucial aspect in BP design. Different approaches have been recently introduced aiming at extending existing BP modelling notations to improve their capabilities for human resource management. However, the scope of the proposals is usually quite limited, and most of them provide ad-hoc solutions for specific scenarios. Resource Assignment Language (RAL) was developed just to overcome such shortcomings, being independent of the modelling notation in which it is used, and providing interesting resource analysis mechanisms. Still, RAL is currently focused on a single BP instance and, thus, resource assignments cannot contain constraints between two process instances. in this paper, we introduce a complete (i.e. syntactical and semantical) extension for RAL to provide it with history-aware expressions. These expressions will, in turn, be able to be automatically resolved and analysed along with the other RAL expressions, thanks to RAL’s semantics based on Description Logics (DLs)

Introduction to the digital government and Business Process Management (BPM) minitrack HICSS'54

Digital Government (traditionally known as e- Government) focuses on value delivery to citizens through information and communication technology (ICT) support for processes, activities and resources. Digital government’s collaborative processes involve organizations (employees, technologies), partners (providers, consumers), and users (citizens, foreigners), leading to complex interactions within different e- Government models and available technologies. Business Process Management (BPM) constitutes a real asset for enhancing the services of an organization and their coordination, as well as the products that each actor of a virtual network delivers to meet clients’ expectations (citizens, patients, etc.). Successful interorganizational process management within e- Government collaborative organizations will lead to better conceptual and technological integration, not only with each other but also with citizens and users in general. To this end, it is necessary to devise new ways to deal with the complexity of e-Government collaborative process definition, modeling, analysis, enactment and monitoring from various dimensions and points of view including theory, engineering, interoperability, agility, social aspects, etc

On the Identification of Data-Related Compliance Problems in Business Processes

Ensuring the compliance of business processes with regulations is becoming increasingly important to organizations. in this scenario, data play an important role. Little work has been done on data checking in business processes and no standard definitions have been given to describe data-related compliance problems. The goal of this paper is three-fold: (i) to identify and organise the data-related compliance problems that may arise in a business process model and thus to introduce a common vocabulary for these problems, (ii) to analyse the capabilities of BPMN 2.0 for defining business process models with sufficient information about data to enable the checking of data-related compliance problems, and (iii) to describe the current situation of data-related compliance in terms of the existing automated support and envisage future work to deal with data-aware business process compliance checking