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

A template-based approach for responsibility management in executable business processes

Process-oriented organisations need to manage the different types of responsibilities their employees may have w.r.t. the activities involved in their business processes. Despite several approaches provide support for responsibility modelling, in current Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) the only responsibility considered at runtime is the one related to performing the work required for activity completion. Others like accountability or consultation must be implemented by manually adding activities in the executable process model, which is time-consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we address this limitation by enabling current BPMS to execute processes in which people with different responsibilities interact to complete the activities. We introduce a metamodel based on Responsibility Assignment Matrices (RAM) to model the responsibility assignment for each activity, and a flexible template-based mechanism that automatically transforms such information into BPMN elements, which can be interpreted and executed by a BPMS. Thus, our approach does not enforce any specific behaviour for the different responsibilities but new templates can be modelled to specify the interaction that best suits the activity requirements. Furthermore, libraries of templates can be created and reused in different processes. We provide a reference implementation and build a library of templates for a well-known set of responsibilities

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)

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

Defining Process Performance Indicators: an Ontological Approach

It is increasingly important to evaluate the performance of business processes. A key instrument to carry out this evaluation is by means of Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) as suggested in many methodologies and frameworks like, for instance, COBIT, ITIL or EFQM. As a consequence, it is convenient to integrate the management of PPIs into the whole business process lifecycle from its design to its evaluation. in this paper, we focus on the definition of PPIs as a necessary step to achieve that integration. Unfortunately, current proposals are not able to specify several usual types of PPIs, specially those related to data, and are not well designed to enable the automated analysis of PPIs at design-time. in this paper, we present an ontology for the definition of process performance indicators that overcomes this issue, explicitly defines the relationships between the indicators and the elements defined in a business process modelled in BPMN, and enables the analysis of PPIs at design-time. Furthermore, this ontology has been validated by means of several real-world scenarios

Evaluación y seguimiento de trabajos en equipo de desarrollo de software a través de la calidad del código fuente

La enseñanza de buenas prácticas en el diseño e implementación de sistemas software es una tarea que exige al profesorado una docencia personalizada y un seguimiento continuo del aprendizaje. En este artículo presentamos nuestra experiencia en la implantación de una plataforma de evaluación de calidad del software para que estudiantes y profesores puedan obtener métricas objetivas de calidad y esfuerzo sobre los trabajos desarrollados. Para ello se ha utilizado la plataforma Sonar, que permite obtener información sobre la calidad de varios proyectos de desarrollo de software al mismo tiempo. Esta plataforma se ha integrado dentro de un sistema de gestión del ciclo de vida de aplicaciones (ALM) para que forme parte del día a día del estudiante. Esto nos ha permitido realizar un seguimiento detallado con poco esfuerzo y definir rúbricas de evaluación con términos objetivos y conocidos a priori por los estudiantes.SUMMARY -- Teaching good practices in software design and implementation is a demanding task that requires a close evaluation of students’ work. In this paper, we describe our experience in setting up a platform for software quality evaluation providing lectures and students with objective metrics about the software projects developed. We use the Sonar platform to track the quality of several software projects at the same time. This platform is integrated into an Application Lifecyle Management (ALM) environment so the students can use it in their everyday work. It has reduced the effort to evaluate the students’ work by using objective and well defined criteria known by the students beforehand.Peer Reviewe

Towards Modelling and Tracing Key Performance Indicators in Business Processes

It is increasingly important to evaluate the performance of business processes. A key instrument in order to detect the state of cur rent and completed processes, as well as to identify undesired behaviour, and suggest potential improvements are the key performance indicators (KPIs). The KPI lifecycle in the context of business process driven devel opment comprises the definition, measuring, analysis and report phases. In this paper we analyse how some current proposals deal with these stages, concluding that none of them covers properly the entire cycle; we also identify the challenges which are to be faced to achieve this goal of evaluating business processes performanceComisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT) TIN2006-00472Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT) SETI (TIN2009-07366)Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-253

Redefining a Process Engine as a Microservice Platform

In recent years, microservice architectures have emerged as an agile approach for scalable web applications on cloud environments. As each microservice is developed and deployed independently, they can be developed in the platform and programming language that best suite their purposes, using a simple communication protocol, as REST APIs or asynchronous event-based collaborations, to compose them. In this paper, we argue that process engines provide an excellent platform to develop microservices whose business logic involves complex work flows or processes so that a Business Process language can be used as high level language to develop these services and a process engine to execute it. We identify the requirements for integrating a process engine in a microservice architecture and we propose how the communication and deployment in a microservice architecture can be handled by the process engine.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-70560-R (BELI)Junta de Andalucía P12-TIC-1867 (COPAS)Junta de Andalucía P10-TIC-590

Explaining the Non-Compliance between Templates and Agreement Offers in WS-Agreement

A common approach to the process of reaching agreements is the publication of templates that guide parties to create agreement offers that are then sent for approval to the template publisher. in such scenario, a common issue the template publisher must address is to check whether the agreement offer received is compliant or not with the template. Furthermore, in the latter case, an automated explanation of the reasons of such non-compliance is very appealing. Unfortunately, although there are proposals that deal with checking the compliance, the problem of providing an automated explanation to the non-compliance has not yet been studied in this context. in this paper, we take a subset of the WS-Agreement recommendation as a starting point and we provide a rigorous definition of the explanation for the non-compliance between templates and agreement offers. Furthermore, we propose the use of constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) solvers to implement it and provide a proof-of-concept implementation. The advantage of using CSPs is that it allows expressive service level objectives inside SLAs