Business Process Variability:a study into process management and verification

Business process management (BPM) beheert en optimaliseert bedrijfsprocessen met het doel om productiviteit en bedrijfsprestaties te verhogen. BPM is een snel evoluerend veld door nieuw opkomende vereisten vanuit flexibele bedrijfstakken waar bedrijfsprocessen steeds minder star behoren te zijn. Waar BPM in het verleden specifieke rigide en repetitieve werkeenheden ondersteunde voor de lokale gebruiker, wordt tegenwoordig vereist dat het losgekoppelde processen ondersteunt in cloud configuraties, te midden van vele gebruikers met elk vele verschillende eisen.Zolang het BPM veld een stijgend aantal snel evoluerende bedrijfsprocessen in flexibele bedrijfstakken ondersteunt, moet de evolutie van elk bedrijfsproces aanhoudend correct gedrag vertonen en tevens voldoen aan de opgelegde wet- en regelgeving en interne bedrijfsregels. Om het aanhoudend correct gedrag te ondersteunen van snel evoluerende BP, of de definitie van een breed aantal soortgelijke bedrijfsprocessen, evalueren we de toepassing van formele verificatietechnieken als mogelijke oplossing voor analyse van het juiste gedrag en wettelijk conforme ontwerp van bedrijfsprocessen binnen mogelijke proces families, welke plaatsvindt voorafgaand aan de uitvoering van dat bedrijfsproces.Een innovatieve benadering voor verificatie tijdens de ontwerpfase wordt gepresenteerd. De benadering ondersteunt de verschillende vertakkende en samenvoegende constructies zoals toegestaan in bedrijfsprocesmodellen en hun service composities. Evaluaties met betrekking tot expressiviteit bewijzen dat, anders dan doorgaans toegepaste transitiesystemen, het voorgestelde model bekende bedrijfsprocespatronen juist vastlegt. Verder behoudt het model informatie over de aanwezigheid van parallelle activiteiten en de lokale volgende activiteit: een eigenschap uniek aan de voorgestelde aanpak.Business Process Management (BPM) manages and optimizes business processes with the intent to increase productivity and performance. BPM is a rapidly evolving field due to new requirements emerging at agile branches of business where business processes are required to be less and less rigid. Where BPM supported local user-specific rigid and repetitive units of work in the past, these days it is required to support loosely-coupled processes in cloud configurations among many users with each many different requirements.As the field of BPM continues to manage an increasing number of rapidly evolving business processes in agile environments, the evolution of each business process must continue to always behave in a correct manner and remain compliant with the laws, regulations, and internal business requirements imposed upon it. To manage the correct behavior of quickly evolving business processes, or the definition of a wide variety of similar business processes, we evaluate the application of formal verification techniques as a possible solution for the pre-runtime analysis of the correct behavior and compliant design of business processes within possible process families. A novel approach allowing pre-runtime verification that supports the different branching and merging constructs allowed by business process models and their service compositions is presented. Evaluations on expressive power demonstrate that, other than the generally employed transition systems, the proposed model correctly captures well-known business process patterns. Furthermore, it maintains information on parallel occurrences of activities and the local next activity occurrence: an ability which is unique to the presented approach

Requirements and Tools for Variability Management

Explicit and software-supported Business Process Management has become the core infrastructure of any medium and large organization that has a need to be efficient and effective. The number of processes of a single organization can be very high, furthermore, they might be very similar, be in need of momentary change, or evolve frequently. If the ad-hoc adaptation and customization of processes is currently the dominant way, it clearly is not the best. In fact, providing tools for supporting the explicit management of variation in processes (due to customization or evolution needs) has a profound impact on the overall life-cycle of processes in organizations. Additionally, with the increasing adoption of Service-Oriented Architectures, the infrastructure to support automatic reconfiguration and adaptation of business process is solid. In this paper, after defining variability in business process management, we consider the requirements for explicit variation handling for (service based) business process systems. eGovernment serves as an illustrative example of reuse. In this case study, all local municipalities need to implement the same general legal process while adapting it to the local business practices and IT infrastructure needs. Finally, an evaluation of existing tools for explicit variability management is provided with respect to the requirements identified.

Efficient conditional compliance checking of business process models

When checking compliance of business processes against a set of business rules or regulations, the ability to handle and verify conditions in both the model and the rules is essential. Existing design-time verification approaches, however, either completely lack support for the verification of conditions or propose costly verification methods that also consider the full data perspective. This paper proposes a novel light-weight verification method, which is preferable over expensive approaches that include the data perspective when considering structural properties of a business process model. This novel approach generates partial models that capture only relevant execution states to the conditions under investigation. The resulting model can be verified using existing model checking techniques. The computation of such partial models fully abstracts conditions from the full models and specifications, thus avoiding the analysis of the full data perspective. The proposed method is complete with respect to the analyzed execution paths, while significantly reducing the state space complexity by pruning unreachable states given the conditions under investigation. This approach offers the ability to check if a process is compliant with rules and regulations on a much more fine-grained level, and it enables a more precise formulation of the conditions that should and should not hold in the processes. The approach is particularly useful in dynamic environments where processes are constantly changing and efficient conditional compliance checking is a necessity. The approach – implemented in Java and publicly available – is evaluated in terms of performance and practicability, and tested over both synthetic datasets and a real-life case from the Australian telecommunications sector

"log data compliance"

This disclosure relates to a computer analysing log data. The computer receives log data comprising traces having log events from respective process executions. The computer creates a stream of log events, wherein the stream is sorted by the event time. The computer iterates over the stream of log events, and for each log event, executes update functions that define updates of a set of variables based on the log events. The set of variables comprises at least one cross-trace variable to calculate an updated value of the set of variables. The update functions define updates of the cross-trace variable in response to the log events of the traces. The computer further executes evaluation functions on the set of variables to determine compliance in relation to the log data based on the updated value. The evaluation functions represent compliance rules based on the set of variables including the cross-trace variable