Mismatch patterns in similar business processes

To unify similar business processes, such as processes of similar business units or similar organizations, the similarities and differences between these business processes must be detected and the differences must be resolved. This paper presents a collection of patterns that describe frequently occurring mismatches between similar business processes. These patterns are helpful in the mismatch detection step. We discovered them in practice by comparing processes that we obtained from different business units in two organizations. The patterns help when merging processes in case of a merger between organizations. They also help when merging processes to construct a standardized process that allows organizations that adhere to the standard to interact successfully

Consistency in multi-viewpoint architectural design

This thesis presents a framework that aids in preserving consistency in multi-viewpoint designs. In a multi-viewpoint design each stakeholder constructs his own design part. We call each stakeholder’s design part the view of that stakeholder. To construct his view, a stakeholder has a viewpoint. This viewpoint defines the design concepts, the notation and the tool support that the stakeholder uses. The framework presented in this thesis focuses on architectural multiviewpoint design of distributed systems. A distributed system is a system of which the parts execute on different physical system nodes. Interaction between the system parts plays an important role in such systems. An example of a distributed system is a mobile communication network. In such a network, the parts of the system execute on e.g. the mobile telephones of the clients, the desktops of the employees of the network operator and the mobile access points. Architectural design is the area of design that focuses on higher levels of abstraction in the design process. The lowest level of abstraction that we consider is the level at which the system parts correspond to parts that can be deployed on communication middleware. Using our framework, consistency is preserved through inter-viewpoint relations and consistency rules that must be specified by the stakeholders. The stakeholders use inter-viewpoint relations to specify how one view relates to another and they use consistency rules to specify what rules must at least be satisfied in a consistent design. To aid in preserving consistency, our framework defines: – a common set of basic design concepts; – pre-defined inter-viewpoint relations; – pre-defined consistency rules; – a language to represent inter-viewpoint relations and consistency rules. The basic design concepts that the framework defines have been adopted from earlier work. These concepts were developed by carefully examining the area of distributed systems design. Using our framework, viewpoint-specific design concepts must be defined as compositions or specializations of these basic concepts. Hence, the basic concepts form a common vocabulary that the different stakeholders can use to understand each other’s designs. The framework pre-defines inter-viewpoint relations that can be reused to specify how one view relates to another. The two main types of inter-viewpoint relations that it pre-defines are: refinement relations and overlap relations. Refinement relations exist between views that (partly) consider the same design concerns at different levels of abstraction. Overlap relations exist between views that (partly) consider the same design concerns at the same level of abstraction. We derived the pre-defined relations by examining existing frameworks for multi-viewpoint design and extracting frequently occurring relations between viewpoints in these frameworks. If a pre-defined inter-viewpoint relation exists between two views, this implies that certain consistency rules must be satisfied. Specifically, if two views have a refinement relation, this implies that one must preserve the system properties specified by the other. If two views have an overlap relation, this implies that the two views must be equivalent with respect to the overlap that they have. Our framework pre-defines consistency rules that can be re-used to verify these properties. We define an architecture for tool-support to aid in specifying view relations and consistency rules and to check whether the specified consistency rules hold. The architecture contains the pre-defined relations and consistency rules, such that they can be re-used. As a case study for the framework we define adapted versions of the RM-ODP enterprise, computational and information viewpoints, using our framework. We define the concepts from these viewpoints as compositions of the basic concepts. Also, we define the relations between views from these viewpoints, as well as the corresponding consistency rules, using the relations and consistency rules that are pre-defined by the framework. The results of the case study support the claim that our framework aids in preserving consistency in multi-viewpoint designs

An Approach to Relate Viewpoints and Modeling Languages

The architectural design of distributed enterprise applications from the viewpoints of different stakeholders has been proposed for some time, for example, as part of RM-ODP and IEEE 1471, and seems now-a-days to gain acceptance in practice. However, much work remains to be done on the relationships between different viewpoints. Failing to relate viewpoints may lead to a collection of viewpoint models that is inconsistent, and may therefore lead to an incorrect implementation. This paper defines an approach that helps designers to relate different viewpoints to each other. Thereby, it helps to enforce the consistency of the overall design. The results of this paper are expected to be particularly interesting for Model Driven Architecture (MDA) projects, since the proposed models can be used for the explicit definition of the models and relationships between models in an MDA trajectory

Merging business process models

This paper addresses the following problem: given two business process models, create a process model that is the union of the process models given as input. In other words, the behavior of the produced process model should encompass that of the input models. The paper describes an algorithm that produces a single configurable process model from a pair of process models. The algorithm works by extracting the common parts of the input process models, creating a single copy of them, and appending the differences as branches of configurable connectors. This way, the merged process model is kept as small as possible, while still capturing all the behavior of the input models. Moreover, analysts are able to trace back which model(s) a given element in the merged model originates from. The algorithm has been prototyped and tested against process models taken from several application domains

Similarity of business process models : metrics and evaluation

It is common for large and complex organizations to maintain repositories of business process models in order to document and to continuously improve their operations. Given such a repository, this paper deals with the problem of retrieving those process models in the repository that most closely resemble a given process model or fragment thereof. The paper presents three similarity metrics that can be used to answer such queries: (i) label matching similarity that compares the labels attached to process model elements; (ii) structural similarity that compares element labels as well as the topology of process models; and (iii) behavioral similarity that compares element labels as well as causal relations captured in the process model. These similarity metrics are experimentally evaluated in terms of precision and recall, and in terms of correlation of the metrics with respect to human judgement. The experimental results show that all three metrics yield comparable results, with structural similarity slightly outperforming the other two metrics. Also, all three metrics outperform traditional search engines when it comes to searching through a repository for similar business process models

Towards a methodology for the engineering of event-driven process applications

Successful applications of the Internet of Things such as smart cities, smart logistics, and predictive maintenance, build on observing and analyzing business-related objects in the real world for business process execution and monitoring. In this context, complex event processing is increasingly used to integrate events from sensors with events stemming from business process management systems. This paper describes a methodology to combine the areas and engineer an event-driven logistics processes application. Thereby, we describe the requirements, use cases and lessons learned to design and implement such an architecture

Indexing and efficient instance-based retrieval of process models using untanglings

Process-Aware Information Systems (PAISs) support executions of operational processes that involve people, resources, and software applications on the basis of process models. Process models describe vast, often infinite, amounts of process instances, i.e., workflows supported by the systems. With the increasing adoption of PAISs, large process model repositories emerged in companies and public organizations. These repositories constitute significant information resources. Accurate and efficient retrieval of process models and/or process instances from such repositories is interesting for multiple reasons, e.g., searching for similar models/instances, filtering, reuse, standardization, process compliance checking, verification of formal properties, etc. This paper proposes a technique for indexing process models that relies on their alternative representations, called untanglings. We show the use of untanglings for retrieval of process models based on process instances that they specify via a solution to the total executability problem. Experiments with industrial process models testify that the proposed retrieval approach is up to three orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art

Choreography and Orchestration Conformance for System Design

Abstract. In a previous work we have presented a formal framework devoted to show the relevance of choreography and orchestration in the design of service oriented applications. Even if useful to start a formal investigation of the relationship between choreography and orchestration, the proposed framework was not suitable to specify real case studies. In fact, it simply permitted to specify all possible computations abstracting away from the conditions driving the choice of the actual behaviour. In this paper we tackle this problem by introducing the notion of state variables. The addition of state requires a substantial modification of the entire framework because the same state variable, at the level of choreography, can be actually stored in distributed orchestrators that will need to synchronize in order to maintain consistent views. In order to faithfully investigate this problem we also need to modify the formal model at the orchestration level, moving from synchronous to asynchronous communication as the latter is the communication modality of the ordinary communication infrastructures.