Abderrahmane Leshob

Towards a Methodology for Representing and Classifying Business Processes

Organizations build information systems to support their business processes. Some of these business processes are industry or organization-specific, but most are common to many industries and are used, modulo a few modifications, in different contexts. A precise modeling of such processes would seem to be a necessary prerequisite for building information systems that are aligned with the business objectives of the organization and that fulfill the functional requirements of its users. Yet, there are few tools, conceptual or otherwise, that enable organizations to model their business processes precisely and efficiently, and fewer tools still, to map such process models to the software components that are needed to support them. Our work deals with the problem of building tools to model business processes precisely, and to help map such models to software models. In this paper, we describe a representation and classification of business processes that supports the specification of organization-specific processes by, 1) navigating a repository of generic business processes, and 2) automatically generating new process variants to accommodate the specifics of the organization. We present the principles underlying our approach, and describe the state of an ongoing implementation.

Value-Chain Discovery from Business Process Models

Companies model their business processes either for documentation, analysis, re-engineering or automation purposes; usually using normalized business process modeling languages such as EPC or BPMN. Although these models explain how the processes should be performed and by whom, they abstract away their business rationale (i.e. what is offered and why). Business modeling aims to answer the latter and different frameworks have been proposed to express the process in terms of value-chains. Ensuring alignment between both of these views manually is error prone and labor intensive. In this paper, we present a novel approach to derive a value-chain - expressed in REA - from a business process model expressed in BPMN. At the heart of our approach and our main contribution lies a set of nine general business patterns we have defined and classified as structural and behavioral patterns.

Methodology and Tool for Business Process Compensation Design

A typical e-business transaction takes hours or days to complete, involves a number of partners, and comprises many failure points. With short-lived transactions, database systems ensure atomicity by either committing all of the elements of the transaction, or by canceling all of them in case of a failure. With typical e-business transactions, strict atomicity is not practical, and we need a way of reversing the effects of those activities that cannot be rolled back: that is compensation. For a given business process, identifying the various failure points, and designing the appropriate compensation processes represents the bulk of process design effort. Yet, business analysts have little or no guidance. For a given failure point, there appears to be an infinite variety of ways to compensate for it. We recognize that compensation is a business issue, but we argue that it can be explained in terms of a handful of parameters within the context of the REA ontology, including things such as the type of activity, the type of resource, and organizational policies. We propose a three-step compensation design approach that 1) starts by abstracting a business process to focus on those activities that create/modify value, 2) compensates for those activities, individually, based on values of the compensation parameters, and 3) composes those compensations using a Saga-like approach. In this paper, we present our approach along with an implementation algorithm and propose a business ontology for compensation design.

Towards a Framework for Modeling Business Compensation Processes

A typical e-business transaction takes hours or days to complete, involves a number of partners, and comprises many failure points[8]. With short-lived transactions, database systems ensure atomicity by either committing all of the elements of the transaction, or by canceling all of them in case of a failure. With typical e-business transactions, strict atomicity is not practical, and we need a way of reversing the effects of those activities that cannot be rolled back: that is compensation. For a given business process, identifying the various failure points, and designing the appropriate compensation processes represents the bulk of process design effort[8]. Yet, business analysts have little or no guidance, as for a given failure point, there appears to be an infinite variety of ways to compensate for it. We recognize that compensation is a business issue, but we argue that it can be explained in terms of a handful of parameters within the context of REA ontology [20], including things such as the type of activity, the type of resource, and organizational policies. We propose a three-step process compensation design approach that 1) starts by abstracting a business process to focus on those activities that create/modify value, 2) compensates for those activities, individually, based on values of the compensation parameters, and 3) composes those compensations using a Saga-like approach [10]. In this paper, we present our approach, and discuss issues for future research.

E-Tourism Portal: A Case Study in Ontology-Driven Development

Software development is a fairly complex activity, that is both labour-intensive and knowledge-rich, and systematically delivering high-quality software that addresses the users’ needs, on-time, and within budget, remains an elusive goal. This is even more true for internet applications presents additional challenges, including, 1) a predominance of the highly volatile interaction logic, and 2) stronger time-to-market pressures. Model-driven development purports to alleviate the problem by slicing the development process into a sequence of semantics-preserving transformations that start with a computation-independent model, through to an architecture-neutral platform independent model (PIM), all the way to platform-specific model or code at the other end. That is the idea(l). In general, however, the semantic gap between the CIM and PIM is such that the transition between them is hard to formalize. In this paper, we present a case study where we used an ontology to drive the development of an e-tourism portal. Our project showed that it is possible to drive the development of an internet application from a semantic description of the business entities, and illustrated the effectiveness of this approach during maintenance. It also highlighted the kinds of trade-offs we needed to make to reconcile somewhat lofty design principles with the imperative of producing a product with reasonable quality.

A value-oriented approach to business process specialization

A question-based method to specialize business processes is proposed.The method relies on REA business pattern.The process specialization is automated through model transformations.Empirical studies carried out both with practitioners and graduated students.The validation suggests that the models were correct from a business point of view. Organizations build information systems to support their business processes. Precise modeling of an organizations processes is a prerequisite for building information systems that support those processes. Our goal is to help business analysts produce detailed models of the business processes that best reflect the needs of their organizations. To this end, we propose to a) leverage the best practices in terms of a kernel of generic business processes, and b) provide analysts with tools to customize those processes by generating new process variants. We use business patterns from the Resource Event Agent ontology to identify variation points, and to codify the transformations inherent in the generation of the process variants. We developed a prototype process specialization tool using the Eclipse modeling ecosystem. We tested our approach on a set of processes from the Enterprise Resource Planning literature, and a set of variation points to assess the extent to which: 1) the identified variation points made sense, and 2) whether the generated variants made sense, from a business point of view. The results showed that 94.12% of the variation points made sense, and that 80.6% of the generated process variants corresponded to what the business process management specialists expected.

A pattern-based approach to extract REA value models from business process models

Business models are economic models that describe the rationale of why organizations create and deliver value. These models focus on what organizations offer and why. Business process models capture business activities and the ways in which they are accomplished i.e. their coordination. They explain who is involved in the activities, and how and when these activities should be performed. This paper discusses the alignment between business models and business process models. It proposes a novel systematic method for extracting a value chain i.e. business model expressed in the Resources, Events, Agents REA ontology from a business process model expressed in Business Process Model and NotationTM. Our contribution is twofold: 1 from a theoretical standpoint we identified a set of structural and behavioural patterns that enable us to infer the corresponding REA value chain; 2 from a pragmatic perspective, our approach can be used to derive useful knowledge about the business process and serve as a starting point for business analysis.

Towards a Business-Pattern Approach for UML Models Derivation from Business Process Models

Business processes are considered as first class business assets in nowadays organizations. They are often specified using BPMN language. To automate business processes, software specialists specify the information systems that support them with the use of languages like UML. This paper aims to bridge the gap between the organizations business processes and the information systems that support them. It proposes a model-driven development method that automatically generates detailed UML domain models from business process models expressed in BPMN. Our approach is based on business patterns. It consists of three main transformations: the first transformation extracts the process value chain, the second transformation builds UML domain models for each process in the value chain, and the third transformation elaborates the UML models. We developed a proof-of-concept prototype tool using the Eclipse modeling ecosystem. We tested our approach on a set of business processes from the Enterprise Resource Planning literature. The results showed computational feasibility and the conceptual soundness of the approach.

Ontology-Driven Process Specialization

Business process design is an important activity for the planning and analysis of information systems that support the organization’s business processes. Our goal is to help business analysts produce detailed models of the business processes that best reflect the needs of their organizations. To this end, we propose to, a) leverage the best practices in terms of a catalog of generic business processes, and b) provide analysts with tools to customize those processes by generating, on-demand, new process variants around automatically identified process variation points. We use business patterns from the Resource Event Agent ontology to identify variation points, and to codify the model transformations inherent in the generation of the process variants. We developed a prototype, showing the computational feasibility of the approach. Early feedback from a case study with three Business Process Management (BPM) experts validated the relevance of the variation points, and the correctness of corresponding transformations, within the context of key Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) processes. In this paper, we summarize the approach and report of the results of a larger experiment, gaining insights into the strengths and weaknesses of our approach, and suggesting avenues for improvement.

Towards Automating Business Process Compensation Scoping Logic

Business process compensation is an error recovery strategy aiming at semantically reversing the effects of an interrupted business process execution and restoring it to a valid state. Studies have shown that modeling error handling in general, and compensation in particular, represents the bulk of process design efforts. To that end, we proposed in a previous work an approach to model semi-automatically compensation processes based on a business analysis within the REA framework, restoring it to its initial state. However, we argue that it is neither practical nor desirable to cancel the whole process in some situations. Instead, the process should be reversed to an intermediate state from which it could resume its execution. This work aims at solving this compensation scoping problem by inferring the possible “rollback points”. Our approach relies on a resource flow analysis within the context of an OCL-based behavioral specification of business process activities. In this paper, we present our slicing algorithm and lay our ground ideas on how we could identify possible candidates as process’ rollback activities.