The resource perspective has received much less attention than other business process (BP) perspectives, e.g., control flow. This thesis focuses on human resource management in BPs, and addresses challenges related to resource specification and resource analysis. In particular, it introduces novel techniques for resource specification, which rely on a new resource selection language called RAL; and it provides automated support for a set of analysis operations at design time and at run time based on the formal semantics of RAL defined in description logics (DLs), by leveraging existing DL reasoners. All the contributions have been validated

Cabanillas Macias, Cristina

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ePubWU Institutional RepositoryCristina Cabanillas MaciasEnhancing the management of resource-aware business processesArticle (Accepted for Publication)(Refereed)Original Citation:Cabanillas Macias, Cristina (2016) Enhancing the management of resource-aware businessprocesses. AI Communications, 29 (1). pp. 237-238. ISSN 1875-8452This version is available at: http://epub.wu.ac.at/5686/Available in ePubWU: August 2017ePubWU, the institutional repository of the WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, isprovided by the University Library and the IT-Services. The aim is to enable open access to thescholarly output of the WU.This document is the version accepted for publication and — in case of peer review — incorporatesreferee comments. There are differences in punctuation or other grammatical changes which do notaffect the meaning.http://epub.wu.ac.at/1Enhancing the Management ofResource-Aware Business ProcessesCristina CabanillasInstitute for Information Business, ViennaUniversity of Economics and Business, AustriaE-mail: cristina.cabanillas@wu.ac.atThe resource perspective has received much less at-tention than other business process (BP) perspectives,e.g., control flow. This thesis focuses on human re-source management in BPs, and addresses challengesrelated to resource specification and resource analy-sis by introducing novel techniques for resource speci-fication that rely on a new resource selection languagecalled RAL, and providing automated support for a setof analysis operations at design time and at run timebased on the formal semantics of RAL defined in de-scription logics (DLs), leveraging existing DL reason-ers. All the contributions have been validated.Keywords: analysis operation, business process man-agement, description logics, RAL, resource specifica-tion, resource analysis1. MotivationProviding support for Business Process Manage-ment (BPM) requires taking into account severalperspectives throughout the entire BPM lifecycle.The BP resource perspective has received lees at-tention than others such as control flow, while re-sources are a key element in the correct executionof BP activities. This thesis [1] focuses on humanresource1 management in BPs, specifically on re-source specification, and on design-time (DT) andrun-time (RT) resource analysis. Resource specifi-cation in BPs refers to the assignment of peopleto activities in which they can be involved, andresource analysis in BPs copes with reasoning onresource-aware BP models (i.e., BP models withinformation about resources) to infer informationfrom them in order to understand how resourcesare involved in them.1In the following, resource for the sake of brevity.The solutions for resource specification must betraceable to the concepts defined in the organisa-tional model of the company; expressive, to de-fine a wide variety of resource selection condi-tions; and flexible, to allow the user to decide howthe resource specification is going to be boundto a resource-unaware BP model. The study oftwenty-one approaches showed that, despite mostof them are traceable, more than 50% do not ex-ceed a medium level of expressiveness, and evi-dence about binding flexibility was not found inany approach.Regarding analysis, seven analysis operations re-lated to the relation between people and activi-ties (a.k.a. person-activity operations), and 4 anal-ysis operations related to the permissions peo-ple have to access the information handled inBPs (a.k.a. person-data operations), were identi-fied. The study of seven proposals considering re-source analysis concluded that only one person-activity operation is supported in all cases, butonly one approach offers support at DT (i.e., con-sidering only static information modelled in theBP diagram) and at RT (i.e., considering alsodynamic execution information). Another person-activity operation has often been addressed at DT.Support for the rest of operations is missing.Therefore, the goal of this work was to developtraceable, expressive and flexible techniques to as-sign resources to BPs, and to develop mechanismsfor the automation of the eleven analysis opera-tions at DT and at RT.2. ContributionsThe approach developed to address the previousgoals is depicted in Fig. 1 and summarized below.The first contribution (C1) is the development ofa new language called Resource Assignment Lan-guage (RAL) [3], which enables defining resourceselection conditions in the context of BPM. ItsAI CommunicationsISSN 0921-7126, IOS Press. All rights reserved2 C. Cabanillas / Enhancing the Management of Resource-Aware Business ProcessesAll-­‐in-­‐one	   Separate	  T	  RAL	  Person-­‐Ac4vity	  Ops.	  RAL	  Formal	  Seman4cs	  Person-­‐Data	  Ops.	  Descrip4on	  Logics	  (DLs)	  C1	  C2	  C3	  C4	   C5	  C2.1	   C2.2	  C2.3	  DL-­‐based	  KB	  extensions	   BP2OLC	  Existing Support Our Contributions Resource Specification Resource Analysis Fig. 1. Overview of the contributionsdesign is grounded on an existing organisationalmetamodel [5]. Thus, RAL expressions are trace-able to the organisational model of the company,as long as it considers concepts defined in it. Fur-thermore, RAL is very expressive, according to thesame criteria used to evaluate similar approacheson resource specification from literature.The second contribution (C2) pursues flexibil-ity and introduces a technique to use RAL as anextension of Business Process Model and Nota-tion (BPMN) (C2.1), giving rise to RAL-aware BPmodels; and a technique to use RAL in combina-tion with RASCI matrices (C2.2). Furthermore, aprocedure to automatically shift from the RASCI-based approach to the BPMN-based approach ina seamless way, has been developed (C2.3).The third contribution (C3) defines formal se-mantics for RAL based on Description Logics(DLs) [2]. This provides the RAL expressions withprecise meaning, and eases the automated extrac-tion of information from RAL-aware BP models.Next, relying on RAL semantics, an approach toautomatically analyse how resources are managedin a BP is introduced, specifically automated sup-port for the eleven analysis operations identified.The resolution of the person-activity operations(C4) enables answering questions such as “who canbe involved in activity Sign Authorisation?”, “cananybody in the company take part in all the ac-tivities of the Trip Management process”?, or “isthere any person indispensable for the completionof that BP?”, in an automatic way. The resolu-tion of the person-data operations (C5) providesautomatic answer to questions such as “who canread the Authorisation Form?”, or “who is allowedto update the User Properties file?”. As an in-termediate step, some procedures and extensionsof the DL-based knowledge base created to defineRAL semantics were developed in order to prepareit for automated operation resolution. It impliedconsidering perspectives such as control flow (e.g.,behavioural relationships between activities) anddata flow (e.g., data states and transitions) for theautomation of certain operations. Then, a refer-ence implementation based on DLs was developedto enable the execution of all the operations at DTand at RT, by expressing the analysis operations interms of standard DL reasoning operations, whichare implemented by existing DL reasoners.Support for all the contributions was imple-mented in CRISTAL [4], and some results werealso validated in the scope of a project with amultinational organisation, in which the applica-bility of the automated analysis to check confor-mance with business rules was proven.3. ConclusionsThe outcome of this work is a set of trace-able, expressive and flexible techniques to assignresources to BPs, and DL-based mechanisms to au-tomate a number of resource analysis operationsat DT and at RT. This bridges the gaps found incurrent approaches.AcknowledgementsThis work was also possible thanks to A. Ruiz-Corte´s and M. Resinas, and it was partiallysupported by the Spanish and the AndalusianR&D&I programmes (P12-TIC-1867, TIN2012-32273, TIC-5906, TIN2009-07366, P07-TIC-2533).References[1] C. Cabanillas. Enhancing the Management of Resource-Aware Business Processes. PhD thesis, University ofSeville, 2012. http://goo.gl/FpjDcs.[2] C. Cabanillas, M. Resinas, and A. Ruiz-Corte´s. Defin-ing and Analysing Resource Assignments in BusinessProcesses with RAL. In ICSOC, pages 477–486, 2011.[3] C. Cabanillas, M. Resinas, and A. Ruiz-Corte´s. RAL:A High-Level User-Oriented Resource Assignment Lan-guage for Business Processes. In BPM Workshops(BPD), pages 50–61, 2011.[4] C. Cabanillas, A. del R´ıo-Ortega, M. Resinas, andA. Ruiz-Corte´s. CRISTAL: Collection of Resource-centrIc Supporting Tools And Languages. In BPM De-mos, pages 51–56, 2012.[5] N. Russell, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, D. Edmond, andW.M.P. van der Aalst. Workflow Resource Patterns.Technical report, TU/e Eindhoven, 2004.

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