Adrian Mos

Domain Specific Monitoring of Business Processes Using Concept Probes

This paper proposes a monitoring framework that has business concepts at its core. Rather than relying on generic mechanisms to provide monitoring data, it proposes the notion of concept probes that fully match the business concepts used in the definition of business processes. These concept probes combine monitoring information from business process execution as well as service execution into aggregate information that makes sense from a business concept point of view. The approach has far-reaching implications: firstly, it provides superior understanding of the various execution parameters of the business concepts used in processes (including performance, correctness and context), with potential to aid Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) governance. Secondly, it helps with setting application-wide alarms and constraints potentially corresponding to Service-Level-Agreements, on a concept-level. For a given concept, such constraints can be set-up with immediate effect in all the business processes that use it. Thirdly, this approach gives technical users a deep understanding of the contribution of each of multiple application layers (BPM, SOA, operating system, various other technical layers) to the combined performance of a particular business concept. This can lead to faster reaction time in fixing problems, changes in business partners (that provide better services) or improvements in the underlying infrastructure or application parameters.

A Platform-Independent Mechanism for Deployment of Business Processes Using Abstract Services

This paper deals with the problem of efficiently deploying business processes in service oriented environments with the purpose of enhancing operational agility and improving governance. Todays solutions rely on early coupling between the business process layer and the underlying service oriented architecture layer and this constrains evolution in either of the two layers to the ability of the other layer to adapt. The presented approach leverages abstract architectural mappings that indirectly connect business process activities with service-based assets. It consists of a deployment mechanism that is capable of taking these mappings and generating fully executable artifacts for a variety of runtime platforms. The deployment mechanism is encapsulated in a self-contained entity that is instantiated and executed each time a business process needs to be deployed. This entity contains all the necessary data for the deployment, while ensuring complete accountability of operations. This approach promotes late binding of processes to the underlying SOA and it has the potential to significantly increase the speed of implementing changes in business operations while ensuring long-term sustainability. In addition it promotes independent evolutions of processes and services while encouraging incremental convergence of the SOA towards the needs of the business domain.

Improving Process Robustness through Domain-Specific Model Transformations

Many forward-thinking organizations have adopted domain-specific languages (DSL) as the preferred method for describing business processes. Using DSL-based descriptions helps in removing uncertainty from the semantics of process models. DSLs can evolve in a managed way and with proper versioning of individual processes the original intentions of process designers can be preserved over time. However in collaborative projects, business processes written in different DSLs need to be converted to a common denominator format to facilitate exchange. Due to its widespread adoption, BPMN is ideally placed to serve as the exchange language for complex, cross-domain collaborations. This paper presents an approach for automatic two-way synchronization of domain-specific process models with BPMN diagrams. This approach can be valuable when collaboration between different stakeholders with different expertise is required, as well as when the company wants to leverage its investments in a BPM suite across its process portfolio. In addition, this approach ensures that changes to processes executed through the BPMS are valid with respect to their domain representations, minimizing the potential for runtime problems that are difficult to understand.

QoS-Driven Management of Business Process Variants in Cloud Based Execution Environments

Economy of scale is a key driver behind the Cloud based adoption of a business process. Typically, the management of business process variants focuses on design variants, which permit (ideally small) variations in design (and hence, functionality) for achieving the same (functional) goal, under different functional constraints (such as the compliance obligations that have to be met in different jurisdictions). Little attention has been paid to: (a) variations in process design driven by non-functional considerations (e.g., performance, reliability and cost of operation) and (b) variations in process provisioning in Cloud. This paper seeks to develop means for identifying the correlation between both design and provisioning alternatives and the QoS of business processes deployed in the Cloud. Additionally, we explore the role of the context in determining the performance of a process. We use a set of data mining techniques (specifically decision tree learning, support vector machine and the k-nearest neighbour technique) to mine insights about these correlations. Proposed approaches are evaluated using a synthetic dataset as well as a real dataset.

Business Matter Experts do Matter: A Model-Driven Approach for Domain Specific Process Design and Monitoring

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. Todays 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 specific-layer on top of current solutions so business stakeholders can design and understand their processes in a more intuitive way. We rely on previously proposed technical solutions and integrate them in an end-to-end methodology (from design to monitoring and back). The appropriateness and the feasibility of the approach is justified through a use case and a complete prototype implementation.

Multi-Context Systems for Consistency Validation and Querying of Business Process Models

Large organizations today face a growing challenge of managing heterogeneous process collections containing business processes. Explicit semantics inherent to domain-specific models can help alleviate some of the management challenges. Starting with concept definitions, designers can create domain specific processes and eventually generate industry-standard BPMN for use in BPMS solutions. However, in such a multi-layered setting, any of these artefacts (concepts, domain processes and BPMN) can be modified by various stakeholders and changes done by one person may influence models used by others. There is therefore a need for tool support to aid in keeping track of changes done and their impacts on different stakeholders. In this paper, we present a multi-context systems based approach that allows inferring impacts of changes, especially in terms of consistency, and executing semantic queries. In contrast to existing work, our framework allows the co-existence of different formalisms, with potentially different characteristics, offering greater flexibility in knowledge base and tool integration.

Generating Domain-Specific Process Studios

Typical business process management studios provide support for process design through generic languages such as BPMN. This brings several shortcomings related to process governance over time, process ambiguity and complexity for non-technical users. Domain-specific process languages have the potential to correct these issues but they require strong enterprise tool support and integration in order to be successfully adopted. This paper proposes a mechanism for generating intuitive yet feature-rich graphical process studios for various business domains that are fully integrated with standard business process management solutions. It reduces the need for costly development and maintenance of such studios while ensuring that business users have consistent access to the ever-evolving enterprise body of knowledge. The approach uses model-based transformations to generate and support the entire infrastructure required by the studios. This includes the graphical user interface, the conversion capabilities to and from BPMN, embedding of real-time monitoring data from business process engines and service oriented platforms, live multi-user collaboration support, process governance and evolution, domain know-how management, as well as service-level agreement monitoring. The approach has been fully prototyped and integrated with enterprise-level tools and platforms.

Preserving Consistency in Domain-Specific Business Processes Through Semantic Representation of Artefacts

Large organizations today face a growing challenge of managing heterogeneous process collections containing business processes. Explicit semantics inherent to domain-specific models can help alleviate some of the management challenges. Starting with concept definitions, designers can create domain specific processes and eventually generate industry-standard BPMN for use in BPMS solutions. However, any of these artefacts (concepts, domain processes and BPMN) can be modified by various stakeholders and changes done by one person may influence models used by others. There is therefore a need for tool support to aid in keeping track of changes done and their impacts on different stakeholders. In this paper we present an approach towards providing such support based on a semantic layer that records the provenance of the information and accordingly propagates impacts of changes to related resources, and illustrate the applicability of the approach via an illustrative example.

Automated analysis of industrial workflow-based models

Modelling and governance of business processes are important concerns in companies all over the world. By better understanding business processes, different optimizations are made possible, concretely resulting into potential efficiency gains, cost reductions and improvements in agility. The use of formal specification languages for the modelling of business processes paves the way for different kinds of automated analysis. Such analysis can be used to infer properties from the modelled processes that can be used to improve their design. In this paper, we particularly explore two important classes of verification, namely verification of behavioural properties using model checking techniques and data-based analysis using SAT solving. Those verifications are fully automated by using different tools such as the CADP verification toolbox and the Z3 solver. We illustrate our approach on a real-world case study.

Multi-process Reporting and Analysis for Change Management and Performance Reviews

Business process design and governance are two important phases of Business Process Management (BPM). They are however usually performed using tools that tend to be too generic and technical for most business analysts. For instance, they promote Business Intelligence (BI) mechanisms to extract reports for the analysis of the executed processes, but they typically focus on one process definition at a time. This approach has shortcomings in organisations where there are large collections of processes that need to be managed consistently. In previous work, we proposed the generation of domain-specific studios, in order to enable analysts to design their processes in a much more intuitive way than with generic languages. This work is a logical continuation through the addition of domain-specific multi-process reporting and analysis. By defining analytics metrics in a domain-specific space, analysts are able to make business performance reviews and manage change in ways that apply directly and quickly to entire collections of process. The appropriateness and the feasibility of the approach are shown through a detailed use-case and a complete prototype implementation.