Extracting conceptual models, e.g., entity relationship model or Business Process model, from software requirement document is an essential task in the software development life cycle. Business process model presents a clear picture of required system functionality. Operations in business process model together with the data entity consumed, help the software developers to understand the database design and operations to be implemented. Researchers have been aiming at automatic extraction of these artefacts from the requirement document. In this paper, we present an automated approach to extract the entity relationship and business process models from requirements, which are possibly in different formats such as general requirements, use case specification and user stories. Our approach is based on the efficient natural language processing techniques.
Discovering business rules from business process models are of advantage to ensure the compliance of business processes with business rules. Furthermore it provides the agility of business processes in case of business rules evolution. Current approaches are limited on types of rules that can be discovered. This paper analyses the expression power of some popular business process modelling languages in embedding business rules in its presentation and provides indicators to extract various types of business rules from business process models.
We discuss a fully featured multienterprise business process plattform (ME-BPP) based on the concepts of agent-based business processes. Using the concepts of the subject-oriented business process (S-BPM) methodology we developed an architecture to realize a platform for the execution of distributed business processes. The platform is implemented based on cloud technology using commercial services. For our discussion we used the well known Service Interaction Patterns, as they are empirically developed from typical business-to-business interactions. We can demonstrate that all patterns can be …
Recently, information systems like ERP, CRM and WFM record different business events or activities in a log named as event log. Process mining aims at extracting information from event logs to capture business process as it is being executed. Process mining is an important learning task based on captured processes. In order to be competent organizations in the business world; they have to adjust their business process along with the changing environment. Sometimes a change in the business process implies a change into the whole system. Process mining allows for the automated discovery of proce…
In this paper, we propose to rethink the dominant logic of how to model business processes. We think that an actor based approach supports in a much better way the fundamental nature of business processes. We present a proposal for a compiler architecture to model and execute business processes as a set of communicating microservices that are hosted on a general purpose virtual machine for distributed execution.
A Systematic Review of Business Process Improvement: Achievements and Potentials in Combining Concepts from Operations Research and Business Process Management
With the continuous development of business process management technology, the increasing business process models are usually owned by large enterprises. In large enterprises, different stakeholders may modify the same business process model. In order to better manage the changeability of processes, they adopt configurable business process models to manage process variants. However, the process variants will vary with the change in enterprise business demands. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the co-evolution of the process variants so as to effectively manage the business process family.…
Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) are a collection of widely used stencils for integrating enterprise applications and business processes. These patterns represent a "de-facto" standard reference for design decisions when integrating enterprise applications. For each of these patterns we present the integration semantics (model) and the conceptual translation (syntax) to the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), which is a "de-facto" standard for modelling business process semantics and their runtime behavior.
The selection of the most appropriate Web services to realize business tasks still remain an open issue. We propose a multi-criteria algorithm for efficient service selection. Web services and their QoS values are stored in a Web service ontology (WSOnto) and business processes are modeled with the BPMN2.0 specifications. Our algorithm performs an instance-based ontology matching between the WSOnto and the business process ontology. The business context, functional properties and QoS values of Web services are considered. The algorithm computes the variation of QoS values over times. This stra…
We discuss questions about user centric development of business process modeling notations. In the center of our research there is a fully featured multi-enterprise business process platform (ME-BPP) based on the concepts of agent-based business processes, which builds on the formal foundations of the subject-oriented business process management methodology (S-BPM). The platform is implemented based on cloud technology using commercial services. Additionally we developed a "block modeling" technique to find a semantically transparent modeling notation which can be used by novice users to model…
Process maps provide a high-level overview of an organisation's business processes. While used for many years in different shapes and forms, there is little shared understanding of the concept and its relationship to enterprise architecture. In this report we position the concept of business process map within the domain of enterprise architecture. Based on literature, we provide a conceptualisation of the process map as a business process architecture model that can be integrated with the broader enterprise architecture model. From our conceptualisation we derive requirements for designing a …
Business process design and monitoring are essential elements of Business Process Management (BPM), often relying on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). However the current BPM approaches and standards have not sufficiently reduced the Business-IT gap. Today's solutions are mostly domain-independent and platform-dependent, which limits the ability of business matter experts to express business intent and enact process change. In contrast, the approach presented in this paper focuses on BPM and SOA environments in a domain-dependent and platform-independent way. We propose to add a domain spe…
Understanding the evolution of business artifacts will enable business analyst to discover more insight from process execution data. In this context, describing how the artifacts are wired, helps in understanding, predicting and optimizing the behavior of dynamic processes. In many cases, however, process artifacts evolve over time, as they pass through the business's operations. Consequently, understanding the evolution of artifacts becomes challenging and requires analyzing the provenance of business artifacts. In this paper our aim is to analyze and classify existing challenges in artifact …
The complexity of a business environment often causes organizations to produce several inconsistent views on the same business process, leading to fragmentation and inefficiencies. Business process view integration attempts to produce an integrated view from different views of the same model, facilitating the management of models. To study trends around business process view integration, we conduct a systematic literature review to summarize findings since the 1970s, up to its potential novel applications. With a starting corpus of 798 documents, this survey draws up a systematic inventory of …
Business process models describe the way of working in an organization. Typically, business process models distinguish between the normal flow of work and exceptions to that normal flow. However, they often present an idealized view. This means that unexpected exceptions - exceptions that are not modelled in the business process model - can also occur in practice. This has an effect on the efficiency of the organization, because information systems are not developed to handle unexpected exceptions. This paper studies the relation between the occurrence of exceptions and operational performance…
This work presents a fully elaborated ontology, defined via the Ontology Web Language (OWL), of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard to define business process models, and we demonstrate that any BPMN model can be serialized as OWL file. Based on ontological analysis and a corresponding definition of a modeling notation as ontology we show that business process models can be transformed from one notation into another one as long as there are common underlying concepts; this is demonstrated with the case of an actor based, or subject-oriented, view on business processes. Furt…
Process modeling is a suitable tool for improving the business processes. Successful process modeling strongly depends on correct requirements engineering. In this paper, we proposed a combination approach for requirements elicitation for developing business models. To do this, BORE (Business-Oriented Requirements Engineering) method is utilized as the base of our work and it is enriched by the important features of the BDD (Business-driven development) method, in order to make the proposed approach appropriate for modeling the more complex processes. As the main result, our method eventuates …
Blockchain technology enables the execution of collaborative business processes involving untrusted parties without requiring a central authority. Specifically, a process model comprising tasks performed by multiple parties can be coordinated via smart contracts operating on the blockchain. The consensus mechanism governing the blockchain thereby guarantees that the process model is followed by each party. However, the cost required for blockchain use is highly dependent on the volume of data recorded and the frequency of data updates by smart contracts. This paper proposes an optimized method…
This research aims to provide the possibility to the business analysts to be able to know whether their design business processes are feasible or not. In order to solve this problem, we proposed a model called BPMNSemAuto that makes use of the existing services stored in the service registry UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration). From the data extracted from the UDDI, the WSDL files and the tracking data of service execution on the server, a Web Service Ontology (WSOnto) is generated to store all the existing services. The BPMNSemAuto model takes an input of business process d…
Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor to describe the trade-off between short-term workarounds and long-term goals in software development. Despite being widely used to explain technical issues in business terms, industry and academia still lack a proper way to manage technical debt while explicitly considering business priorities. In this paper, we report on a multiple-case study of how two big software development companies handle technical debt items, and we show how taking the business perspective into account can improve the decision making for the prioritization of technical debt. We also pr…
Research on quality issues of business process models has recently begun to explore the process of creating process models. As a consequence, the question arises whether different ways of creating process models exist. In this vein, we observed 115 students engaged in the act of modeling, recording all their interactions with the modeling environment using a specialized tool. The recordings of process modeling were subsequently clustered. Results presented in this paper suggest the existence of three distinct modeling styles, exhibiting significantly different characteristics. We believe that …
In this paper we present a calculus for re nement of business process models based on a precisede nition of business processes and process nets Business process models are a vital concept for communicating with experts of the application domain Depending on the roles and responsibilities of the application domain experts involved process models are discussed on different levels of abstraction These may range from detailed regulations for process execution to the interrelation of basic core processes on a strategic level To ensure consistency and to allow for a exible integration of process inf…
A complex business process demands adaptability as it has been highly influenced by the contextual information. The contextual information declares the underlying semantics on which the process logic depends. Thus one of the challenges of a business process modeling is to include the context sensitivity within the modeling itself. BPMN is the widely accepted tool in this field. All the process modeling languages like EPC, UML, BPMN are not able to express the context awareness as required. In this paper an attempt has been made to offer a means for modeling a complex business process with nece…
This paper presents a flow-based methodology for capturing processes specified in business process modeling. The proposed methodology is demonstrated through re-modeling of an IBM Blueworks case study. While the Blueworks approach offers a well-proven tool in the field, this should not discourage workers from exploring other ways of thinking about effectively capturing processes. The diagrammatic representation presented here demonstrates a viable methodology in this context. It is hoped this explicit analysis of diverse fundamental approaches will benefit the research in the field and also ad…
Business systems these days need to be agile to address the needs of a changing world. Business modelling requires business process management to be highly adaptable with the ability to support dynamic workflows, inter-application integration (potentially between businesses) and process reconfiguration. Designing systems with the in-built ability to cater for evolution is also becoming critical to their success. To handle change, systems need the capability to adapt as and when necessary to changes in users requirements. Allowing systems to be self-describing is one way to facilitate this. Usi…
Business process models abstract complex business processes by representing them as graphical models. Their layout, solely determined by the modeler, affects their understandability. To support the construction of understandable models it would be beneficial to systematically study this effect. However, this requires a basic set of measurable key visual features, depicting the layout properties that are meaningful to the human user. The aim of this research is thus twofold. First, to empirically identify key visual features of business process models which are perceived as meaningful to the us…
Blockchain platforms, such as Ethereum, allow a set of actors to maintain a ledger of transactions without relying on a central authority and to deploy scripts, called smart contracts, that are executed whenever certain transactions occur. These features can be used as basic building blocks for executing collaborative business processes between mutually untrusting parties. However, implementing business processes using the low-level primitives provided by blockchain platforms is cumbersome and error-prone. In contrast, established business process management systems, such as those based on the…
Validating process model against corresponding requirements is one of the most important problems in domain of collaborative processes. In this paper collaborative processes are modeled using the interaction view of BPMN 2.0 standard. Then, requirements are extracted with a goal modeling technique. Different scenarios of each requirement show possible paths for the system. These paths are modeled by sequence diagram and collaborative processes are validated according to the corresponding requirements using Savara tool.
Business Process Reengineering increases enterprise's chance to survive in competition among organizations , but failure rate among reengineering efforts is high, so new methods that decrease failure, are needed, in this paper a business process reengineering method is presented that uses Enterprise Ontology for modelling the current system and its goal is to improve analysing current system and decreasing failure rate of BPR, and cost and time of performing processes, In this method instead of just modelling processes, processes with their : interactions and relations, environment, staffs and…
Today, there are Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS) with a set of business process models which vary over time to meet the new requirements. In a competitive environment, the key challenge of enterprises is to reduce the cost and time of process design and application development. For this purpose, research on reuse in business process management have introduced the concept of configurable process models which attempts to manage business process variability, by integrating a set of process variants in a single model. In this context, many research works were interested in creating and el…
A farm generates a lot of data from various systems, which is then stored in a distributed manner, usually in non-standardized formats, which bears the risk of data inconsistencies. This work addresses this issue by using business process management (BPM) to demonstrate that the use of digital twins (DTs) can improve interoperability between services in the agriculture domain. Steps from the BPM lifecycle were applied to a farming use case in Germany. First, the as-is business process model was discovered and modeled without DTs, analyzed and then redesigned into the to-be model according to t…
Natural language is understandable by human and not machine. None technical persons can only use natural language to specify their business requirements. However, the current version of Business process management and notation (BPMN) tools do not allow business analysts to implement their business processes without having technical skills. BPMN tool is a tool that allows users to design and implement the business processes by connecting different business tasks and rules together. The tools do not provide automatic implementation of business tasks from users' specifications in natural language…
Blockchain technology promises a sizable potential for executing inter-organizational business processes without requiring a central party serving as a single point of trust (and failure). This paper analyzes its impact on business process management (BPM). We structure the discussion using two BPM frameworks, namely the six BPM core capabilities and the BPM lifecycle. This paper provides research directions for investigating the application of blockchain technology to BPM.
Filling the Gap between Business Process Modeling and Behavior Driven Development
行为驱动开发（Behavior Driven Development，NORTH，2006）是一种规范技术，在敏捷方法社区中越来越被接受。BDD通过将这些需求的文本描述连接到测试，允许安全地验证所有功能需求都被源代码正确处理。另一方面，企业信息系统（EIS）的研究人员和实践者则主张在定义系统的任何部分之前，使用业务流程建模（BPM）对系统的底层业务流程进行建模。因此，可以说，在EIS的情况下，功能需求是通过从业务流程模型中识别用例来获得的。本文的目的是，在一个较窄的角度来看，提出使用有限状态机（FSM）的业务流程建模，然后将它们连接到BDD机器，从而推动更好的质量为EIS。从更广泛的角度来看，本文旨在引发对各种BPM符号映射的讨论，因为业务流程建模还没有真正的标准（Moller et al.，2007年，BDD。首先，从历史的角度来看，从以前的建议，这一个出现的演变，然后从模型驱动开发（MDD）的BDD的变化的原因也将在历史的角度。最后，使用FSM的建议，特别是通过使用UML状态图，将提出，其次是一些结论。
The traditional approach used to implement a business process (BP) in today's information systems (IS) no longer covers the actual needs of the dynamically changing business. Therefore, a necessity for a new approach of dynamic business process (DBP) modelling and simulation has arisen. To date, existing approaches to DBP modelling and simulation have been incomplete, i.e. they lack theory or a case study or both. Furthermore, there is no commonly accepted definition of BDP. Current BP modelling tools are suitable almost solely for the modelling and simulation of a static BP that strictly pres…
Blockchain has emerged as one of the most promising and revolutionary technologies in the past years. Companies are exploring implementation of use cases in hope of significant gains in efficiencies. However, to achieve the impact hoped for, it is not sufficient to merely replace existing technologies. The current business processes must also be redesigned and innovated to enable realization of hoped for benefits. This conceptual paper provides a theoretical contribution on how blockchain technology and smart contracts potentially can, within the framework of the seven principles of business p…
In the recent past, software product line engineering has become one of the most promising practices in software industry with the potential to substantially increase the software development productivity. Software product line engineering approach spans the dimensions of business, architecture, software engineering process and organization. The increasing popularity of software product line engineering in the software industry necessitates a process maturity evaluation methodology. Accordingly, this paper presents a business maturity model of software product line, which is a methodology to e…
Hierarchy has widely been recognized as a viable approach to deal with the complexity of conceptual models. For instance, in declarative business process models, hierarchy is realized by sub-processes. While technical implementations of declarative sub-processes exist, their application, semantics, and the resulting impact on understandability are less understood yet-this research gap is addressed in this work. In particular, we discuss the semantics and the application of hierarchy and show how sub-processes enhance the expressiveness of declarative modeling languages. Then, we turn to the im…
Blockchain technology provides a tamper-proof mechanism to execute inter-organizational business processes involving mutually untrusted parties. Existing approaches to blockchain-based process execution are based on code generation. In these approaches, a process model is compiled into one or more smart contracts, which are then deployed on a blockchain platform. Given the immutability of the deployed smart contracts, these compiled approaches ensure that all process instances conform to the process model. However, this advantage comes at the price of inflexibility. Any changes to the process …
