Reusing artifact-centric business process models : a behavioral consistent specialization approach

Process reuse is one of the important research areas that address efficiency issues in business process modeling. Similar to software reuse, business processes should be able to be componentized and specialized in order to enable flexible process expansion and customization. Current activity/control-flow centric workflow modeling approaches face difficulty in supporting highly flexible process reuse, limited by their procedural nature. In comparison, the emerging artifact-centric workflow modeling approach well fits into these reuse requirements. Beyond the classic class level reuse in existing object-oriented approaches, process reuse faces the challenge of handling synchronization dependencies among artifact lifecycles as parts of a business process. In this article, we propose a theoretical framework for business process specialization that comprises an artifact-centric business process model, a set of methods to design and construct a specialized business process model from a base model, and a set of behavioral consistency criteria to help check the consistency between the two process models. © 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature

UniFlexView : a unified framework for consistent construction of BPMN and BPEL process views

Process view technologies allow organizations to create different granularity levels of abstraction of their business processes, therefore enabling a more effective business process management, analysis, interoperation, and privacy controls. Existing research proposed view construction and abstraction techniques for block-based (ie, BPEL) and graph-based (ie, BPMN) process models. However, the existing techniques treat each type of the two types of models separately. Especially, this brings in challenges for achieving a consistent process view for a BPEL model that derives from a BPMN model. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, namely UniFlexView, for supporting automatic and consistent process view construction. With our framework, process modelers can use our proposed View Definition Language to specify their view construction requirements disregarding the types of process models. Our UniFlexView's system prototype has been developed as a proof of concept and demonstration of the usability and feasibility of our framework. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Enabling situational awareness of business processes

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to explore the ways of integrating situational awareness into business process management for the purpose of realising hyper automated business processes. Such business processes will help improve their customer experiences, enhance the reliability of service delivery and lower the operational cost for a more competitive and sustainable business. Design/methodology/approach: Ontology has been deployed to establish the context modelling method, and the event handling mechanisms are developed on the basis of event calculus. An approach on performance of the proposed approach has been evaluation by checking the cost savings from the simulation of a large number of business processes. Findings: In this research, the authors have formalised the context presentation for a business process with a focus on rules and entities to support context perception; proposed a system architecture to illustrate the structure and constitution of a supporting system for intelligent and situation aware business process management; developed real-time event elicitation and interpretation mechanisms to operationalise the perception of contextual dynamics and real-time responses; and evaluated the applicability of the proposed approaches and the performance improvement to business processes. Originality/value: This paper presents a framework covering process context modelling, system architecture and real-time event handling mechanisms to support situational awareness of business processes. The reported research is based on our previous work on radio frequency identification-enabled applications and context-aware business process management with substantial extension to process context modelling and process simulation. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited

Efficiency analysis of alternative production systems in Kosovo - an ecosystem services approach

The efficiency estimation and the interpretation of its behavior are of extreme interest for primary producer in agriculture as well as for policy makers. In Kosovo one of the main objectives of Agriculture and Rural Development Plan 2007-2013 and 2014-2020 is to improve competitiveness and the efficiency of primary agricultural producers and to attain sustainable land use. Regardless of this, there was a lack of studies on farm efficiency estimation and the productivity changes of the agriculture sector in Kosovo. Therefore, the conducted study of this thesis focuses on estimation and the analysis of efficiency at farm level. More specifically, the study aimed estimation of technical, economic, and environmental efficiency of the farms oriented on tomato, grape and apple production. In addition, identification of the factors that extensively explain the variation of the efficiency scores among farms was sought. The study was based entirely on primary data, collected in three different stages. In the first stage, a survey using structured questionnaire was conducted with 120 farms which were distributed equally for each selected production system in the study. Farm efficiency scores were obtained using a Data Envelopment Analysis, which is a linear programming optimization technique that measures relative efficiency of a set of comparable units. In general, the efficiency scores for three different production systems were high, showing that there was little space for efficiency improvement. On average, tomato farms tend to be more technical efficient, followed by scale, revenue, and cost allocative efficiency. Farmers oriented in grape production were very scale efficient, followed by technical, revenue and cost allocative efficiency. Apple farms on average were performing relatively well in terms of technical efficiency which was the highest on average, followed by revenue efficiency and scale efficiency. Factors which were proved to be statistically important in explaining the variation of the efficiency scores among the farms were household size, farm size and number of cultivated crops, number of land plots, farmer´s education and experience in farming. In terms of the position in ranking between technical and environmental efficiency estimation, three different groups of farms were found. The group of farms which showed increase in ranking at environmental efficiency when compared to the technical one. Farms with no difference in ranking, and a group of farms showing a decrease in ranking at environmental efficiency compared to the technical efficiency. Farms which displayed an increase in ranking were mostly farms that improved or maintained good quality of soil at farm land and good level of agro-biodiversity provision. The second group of farms showed no difference in ranking, as they were fully efficient in technical and environmental efficiency estimation. The third group of farms which showed a decrease in ranking were those farms performing weakly in both technical and environmental efficiency. This group of farms were also having lower soil quality at farm land and lower agro-biodiversity when compared to the averages of total sample

On extending support for modeling artifact-centric business processes

Nowadays, businesses are forced by economic constraints and competitive business environment; therefore, they seek for an innovative improvement of their business operations in order to outperform their competitors. This brings in challenges to the modeling, design, and management of complex and dynamic requirements of business processes. The objective of the research was to tackle three most important issues in modern business process management. The outcome of the research is a novel framework that provides the following features to businesses. First, they can systematically reuse their existing business processes in a more efficient way. Second, they can achieve the highest degree of flexibility, autonomy, and efficiency while they are collaborating in a business process. Last, they can automatically visualize their business processes and effectively develop web-based user interfaces to support interaction between users and processes in a collaborative environment. In the business point of view, an organization that uses this framework will be beneficial from more cost-savings and operational innovations

UniFlexView: A unified framework for consistent construction of BPMN and BPEL process views

Process view technologies allow organizations to create different granularity levels of abstraction of their business processes, therefore enabling a more effective business process management, analysis, interoperation, and privacy controls. Existing research proposed view construction and abstraction techniques for block-based (ie, BPEL) and graph-based (ie, BPMN) process models. However, the existing techniques treat each type of the two types of models separately. Especially, this brings in challenges for achieving a consistent process view for a BPEL model that derives from a BPMN model. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, namely UniFlexView, for supporting automatic and consistent process view construction. With our framework, process modelers can use our proposed View Definition Language to specify their view construction requirements disregarding the types of process models. Our UniFlexView's system prototype has been developed as a proof of concept and demonstration of the usability and feasibility of our framework. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

A framework for realizing artifact-centric business processes in service-oriented architecture

Over the past few years, the artifact-centric approach to workflow modeling has been beneficially evidenced for both academic and industrial researches. This approach not only provides a rich insight to key business data and their evolution through business processes, but also allows business and IT stakeholders to have a single unified view of the processes. There are several studies on the modeling and its theoretical aspects; however, the possible realization of this approach in a particular technology is still in its fancy stage. Recently, there exist proposals to achieve such realization by converting from artifact-centric model to activity-centric model that can be implemented on existing workflow management systems. We argue that this approach has several drawbacks as the transformation, which is unidirectional, poses loss of information. In this paper, we propose a framework for the realization of artifact-centric business processes in service-oriented architecture achieving a fully automated mechanism that can realize the artifact-centric model without performing model transformation. A comprehensive discussion and comparison of our framework and other existing works are also presented

An Artifact-Centric View-Based Approach to Modeling Inter-organizational Business Processes

Over past several years, there have been increasing needs for more efficient approaches to the design and implementation of inter-organizational business processes. The process collaboration spanning organizational boundaries is deemed to keep the organization autonomy, which means each organization owns its freedom of modifying internal operations to meet their private goals while satisfying the mutual objective with its partners. To achieve these, we propose an artifact-centric view-based framework for inter-organizational process modeling consisting of an artifact-centric collaboration model, and a conformance mechanism between public view and private view to support the participating organization's customization and changes of their internal operations while ensuring the correctness of collaboration process