Analysis and improvement of business process models using spreadsheets

Software in general is thoroughly analyzed before it is released to its users. Business processes often are not - at least not as thoroughly as it could be - before they are released to their users, e.g., employees or software agents. This paper ascribes this practice to the lack of suitable instruments for business process analysts, who design the processes, and aims to provide them with the necessary instruments to allow them to also analyze their processes. We use the spreadsheet paradigm to represent business process analysis tasks, such as writing metrics and assertions, running performance analysis and verification tasks, and reporting on the outcomes, and implement a spreadsheet-based tool for business process analysis. The results of two independent user studies demonstrate the viability of the approach

UIDRe: herramienta CASE de UIDs para el proceso de análisis de requerimientos

Esta tesis brinda un modelo de análisis de requerimientos en el que se intenta descubrir los cruces de requerimientos en las primeras etapas del desarrollo del software. Básicamente el proceso propone facilitar la documentación de crosscutting concerns y dar una breve introducción a las consecuencias de su existencia en la etapa de diseño. Para ello en primer lugar se focaliza en mejorar relevamiento de requerimientos proponiendo la utilización de UIDs que facilita la comunicación con el cliente. Una vez definidos los requerimientos, comienza una etapa análisis donde se localizan los cruces de requerimientos; se brindan medios semánticos para señalar aspectos y composiciones navegacionales. Estos medios semánticos son una parte importante en la contribución porque extiende el modelo de análisis tradicional incursionando en Early Aspects a través de la identificación de aspectos en la etapa de análisis. Entrándonos en la etapa de diseño, utilizamos heurísticas de derivación, obtenemos un modelo de objetos tentativo el cual nos sirve de prototipo. Aunque este prototipo es tentativo, es de gran ayuda yo que nos da un panorama de las entidades (objetos) participantes. Finalmente, proponemos una base de análisis en el que se explora las relaciones encontradas en la identificación de aspectos para modelarlos y documentarlos en la etapa de diseño. El resultado obtenido es información tamizada, depurada, adecuada para un documento de especificación de la aplicación que el desarrollador utilizará para implemente los diferentes aspectos / Themes encontrados. Para acompañar esta teoría tan importante, construimos una herramienta que es capaz de almacenar digitalmente en un documento universal como es XML los requerimientos obtenidos en la etapa de análisis.Facultad de Informátic

UIDRe: herramienta CASE de UIDs para el proceso de análisis de requerimientos

Esta tesis brinda un modelo de análisis de requerimientos en el que se intenta descubrir los cruces de requerimientos en las primeras etapas del desarrollo del software. Básicamente el proceso propone facilitar la documentación de crosscutting concerns y dar una breve introducción a las consecuencias de su existencia en la etapa de diseño. Para ello en primer lugar se focaliza en mejorar relevamiento de requerimientos proponiendo la utilización de UIDs que facilita la comunicación con el cliente. Una vez definidos los requerimientos, comienza una etapa análisis donde se localizan los cruces de requerimientos; se brindan medios semánticos para señalar aspectos y composiciones navegacionales. Estos medios semánticos son una parte importante en la contribución porque extiende el modelo de análisis tradicional incursionando en Early Aspects a través de la identificación de aspectos en la etapa de análisis. Entrándonos en la etapa de diseño, utilizamos heurísticas de derivación, obtenemos un modelo de objetos tentativo el cual nos sirve de prototipo. Aunque este prototipo es tentativo, es de gran ayuda yo que nos da un panorama de las entidades (objetos) participantes. Finalmente, proponemos una base de análisis en el que se explora las relaciones encontradas en la identificación de aspectos para modelarlos y documentarlos en la etapa de diseño. El resultado obtenido es información tamizada, depurada, adecuada para un documento de especificación de la aplicación que el desarrollador utilizará para implemente los diferentes aspectos / Themes encontrados. Para acompañar esta teoría tan importante, construimos una herramienta que es capaz de almacenar digitalmente en un documento universal como es XML los requerimientos obtenidos en la etapa de análisis.Facultad de Informátic

Closing the Gap between Business Process Analysis and Service Workflow Design with the BPM-SIC Methodology

Nowadays companies and organizations are challenged to integrate and automate their business processes. A business process is a set of logically related tasks, carried out to produce a product or service. Business processes are typically implemented using Web services. Web services are programmable interfaces that can be invoked through standard communication protocols. In general, the need to outsource parts of a business processes results in a large number of Web services, which are, generally, heterogeneous and distributed among various organizations and platforms. The ability to select and integrate these Web services at runtime is desirable as it would enable Web services platforms a quick reaction to changing business needs and failures, reducing implementation costs and minimizing losses by poor availability. The goal of dynamic and automatic Web services composition is to generate a composition plan (workflow) at runtime that meets certain business goal. Semantics based techniques exploit specialized services annotation to facilitate the discovery of simple or composed services (matchmaking) that form part of composition plan. Usually, the process of matchmaking places more attention in the selection of services and much less on the behavior of the composed service (workflow) that tends to be very simple. In the industry, on the contrary, the service compounds or workflows are manually defined and typically follow complex control flow patterns that implement elaborate business processes. Although a technique of dynamic and automatic service composition produces an executable workflow that implements a business process, it must be validated in relation to the business goal. This high-level analysis is usually performed by domain experts (BPA Business Process Analyst) who must coordinate with the experts (SA: System Architect) the implementation of the business processes. The conversation between BPA and SA is a fundamental requirement for the cycle of creation of an executable business process. The lack of communication between both participants not only causes delays in development time, but also generates product failures and unnecessary cycles involving often increases in production costs and large losses of money in organizations. In this thesis, we have developed three approaches that allow decreasing the gap between BPA and SA and making their collaboration more effective. On one hand we present a Web service composition technique that is dynamic and automatic and is based on services’ semantic descriptions. The composed service corresponds to an executable workflow with complex control flow, facilitating the SAs implementation task. On the other hand, we provide a tool that allows BPAs to verify and analyze the performance of their business processes. And finally, we exploit both tools in order to propose a methodology that integrates both perspectives allowing knowledge transfer in both directions. We obtained promising results that reveal inconsistencies in the development and design of the business processes as well as provide recommendations for best practices in both directions

Automatic learning algorithm selection for classification via convolutional neural networks

As in any other task, the process of building machine learning models can benefit from prior experience. Meta-learning for classifier selection gains knowledge from characteristics of different datasets and/or previous performance of machine learning techniques to make better decisions for the current modeling process. Meta-learning approaches first collect meta-data that describe this prior experience and then use it as input for an algorithm selection model. In this paper, however, we propose an automatic learning scheme in which we train convolutional networks directly with the information of tabular datasets for binary classification. The goal of this study is to learn the inherent structure of the data without identifying meta-features. Experiments with simulated datasets show that the proposed approach achieves nearly perfect performance in identifying linear and nonlinear patterns, outperforming the traditional two-step method based on meta-features. The proposed method is then applied to real-world datasets, making suggestions about the best classifiers that can be considered based on the structure of the data.Comment: This is a preprint of a work under submission and thus subject to change. 12 page

Profit-based churn prediction based on Minimax Probability Machines

In this paper, we propose three novel profit-driven strategies for churn prediction. Our proposals extend the ideas of the Minimax Probability Machine, a robust optimization approach for binary classification that maximizes sensitivity and specificity using a probabilistic setting. We adapt this method and other variants to maximize the profit of a retention campaign in the objective function, unlike most profit-based strategies that use profit metrics to choose between classifiers, and/or to define the optimal classification threshold given a probabilistic output. A first approach is developed as a learning machine that does not include a regularization term, and subsequently extended by including the LASSO and Tikhonov regularizers. Experiments on well-known churn prediction datasets show that our proposal leads to the largest profit in comparison with other binary classification techniques.Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (CONICYT) CONICYT PIA/BASAL AFB180003 Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (CONICYT) CONICYT FONDECYT 1160738 116089

Modeling and Composing Navigational Concerns in Web Applications. Requirements and Design Issues.

Complex applications, in particular Web applications, deal with a myriad of different concerns and some of them affect several others. The result is that these crosscutting concerns are scattered throughout different software artifacts and tangled with other concerns. In this paper we present an approach for modeling and composing navigational concerns in Web applications. By showing how to build partial navigation scenarios with user interaction diagrams, analyzing how they crosscut and defining corresponding composition rules, we add modularity to the requirements specification stage, facilitating reasoning about the requirements and a consequent tradeoff analysis to support informed decisions of on architectural choices Moreover, by focusing on navigation concerns during the early stages of applications development, we aim to address the impact of crosscutting concerns in design models, improve the discovering of meaningful design artefacts and improve traceability of design decisions. 1

MODELO ESTRATÉGICO RECONFIGURÁVEL PARA A LOGÍSTICA DA INTERFACE TERRESTRE PORTUÁRIA NO CHILE

This article proposes the design of a platform to support the design of public policies for cargo transportation. The focus of attention is what is called the “last port mile” or ports land interface in the inter-port area, which is also known as drayage transport. As a case study, the Port of San Antonio is considered. The results of the tests and experimentation will serve as recommendations for regulations and standards for the design and development of circular economy services in a port logistics community, as well as public policies for the sector.Este artículo propone el diseño de una plataforma para apoyar el diseño de políticas públicas del transporte de carga. Como foco de atención se tiene lo que se denomina la “última milla portuaria” o interfaz terrestre de los puertos en la zona interportuaria que se conoce también como transporte drayage. A modo de caso de estudio, se considera el Puerto de San Antonio. Los resultados de las pruebas y experimentación servirán como recomendaciones de reglamentos y normativas para el diseño y desarrollo de servicios de economía circular en una comunidad logística portuaria, así como políticas públicas para el sector. Este artigo propõe o projeto de uma plataforma para apoiar o projeto de políticas públicas para o transporte de cargas. O foco está no que é chamado de “última milha portuária” ou interface terrestre dos portos na área interportuária, também conhecida como transporte drayage. O porto de San Antonio será considerado como estudo de caso. Os resultados dos testes e experimentos servirão como recomendações para regulamentos e normas para o projeto e desenvolvimento de serviços de economia circular em uma comunidade de logística portuária, bem como políticas públicas para o setor