Andreas Bögl

Semantic Annotation of EPC Models in Engineering Domains to Facilitate an Automated Identification of Common Modelling Practices

An automated identification of common modeling practices from EPC (Event-Driven Process Chain) models requires to perform a semantic analysis of EPC functions and events. The semantic analysis faces the problem that an essential part of the EPC semantics is bound to natural language expressions in functions and events with undefined process semantics. The semantic annotation of natural language expressions provides an adequate approach to tackle this problem. This paper introduces a novel approach that enables an automated semantic annotation of EPC functions and events. It employs semantic patterns to analyze the textual structure of natural language expressions and to relate them to instances of a reference ontology. Thus, semantically annotated EPC model elements are input for subsequent semantic analysis that identifies common modeling practices.

Content-Based Recommendations within a QA System Using the Hierarchical Structure of a Domain-Specific Taxonomy

In this paper we present several content-based recommendation methods for a QA system that rely and use extensively the structure of a domain-specific taxonomy. Our goal is to add semantics to a typical content-based RS in order to improve the quality of the recommendations by mapping relevant keywords from the existing taxonomy to the available questions. In order to test and evaluate the effectiveness of the above mentioned methods, we conducted a supervised survey where we asked several users to rate the recommendations delivered using these methods. The results show that by combining the results retrieved by these methods, we obtain a range of recommendations that satisfy a variety of user expectations.

Towards flexibility in business processes by mining process patterns and process instances

The possibility to react to unexpected situations in business process execution is restricted since all possible process flows must be specified at design-time. Thus, there is need for a flexible approach that reflects the way in which human actors would handle discrepancies between real-life activities and their representation in business process definitions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that supports dynamic business processes and is based on a framework comprising a process pattern library with domain-specific patterns and execution logs for mining related process instances. Given a running business process and an unexpected situation, the proposed approach provides a largely automatic adaptation of the business process by replacing failed activities with fitting process alternatives identified by exploring existing process knowledge. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by applying the main steps to a business scenario taken from the industry domain.

Optimizing Resource Utilization by Combining Running Business Process Instances

Efficient business processes are a critical success factor for organizations in a competitive market environment. One of the key potentials to increase efficiency of business processes is the optimization of resource utilization. The contribution of this paper is a novel approach for combining activities across running process instances to optimize resource utilization; i.e., resources are shared across different process instances. The main benefits of the suggested approach are the identification, disclosure, and application of optimization potentials.

Optimizing Resource Utilization by Combining Activities Across Process Instances

Resource-efficient business processes are a key asset of an organization in a competitive market environment. Current efforts address this issue either at the process schema level by specifying an optimal sequence of process activities or at the process instance level by optimizing resource utilization within a single running process instance.

Exploiting Process Patterns and Process Instances to Support Adaptability of Dynamic Business Processes

The traditional approach for business process modeling is rather static, since all possible process flows must be specified at design-time. This restricts the possibility of the user to react to unexpected situations, so conventional business processes cannot represent the flexible way in which human actors would handle discrepancies between real-world and computerized activities. This paper presents a new approach for dynamic business processes that automatically adapts to changed circumstances based on domain-specific process patterns and an evaluation of related process instances. The presented approach not only finds potential alternatives for failed activities, it also ranks them by exploiting process knowledge implicitly captured by former business process execution.

Automated Construction of Process Goal Trees from EPC-Models to Facilitate Extraction of Process Patterns

A system that enables reuse of process solutions should be able to retrieve “common” or “best practice” pattern solutions (common modelling practices) from existing process descriptions for a certain business goal. A manual extraction of common modelling practices is labour-intensive, tedious and cumbersome. This paper presents an approach for an automated extraction of process goals from Event-driven Process Chains (EPC) and its annotation to EPC functions and events. In order to facilitate goal reasoning for the identification of common modelling practices an algorithm (GTree-Construction) is proposed that constructs a hierarchical goal tree.

Wiederverwendung von Prozessmodellen

Die Neugestaltung und Veranderung von Prozessen mit dem Ziel der Effizienzsteigerung ist eine wiederkehrende Aufgabe in einem dynamischen Umfeld. Die Wiederverwendung von explizitem Prozesswissen in Form von Prozessmodellen findet dabei haufig nicht oder nur in inadaquater Weise statt. Es lassen sich zwei unterschiedliche Formen der Wiederverwendung angeben, die proaktive Wiederverwendung, bei der Artefakte vor Eintreten einer konkreten Anwendung erstellt werden, und die reaktive Wiederverwendung, in der ad hoc Artefakte zur Wiederverwendung ausgewahlt werden. Der Beitrag stellt konfigurierbare Referenzmodelle als Reprasentanten proaktiver Wiederverwendung, dem Paradigma des fallbasierten Schliesens als Reprasentanten reaktiver Wiederverwendung gegenuber.

Exploiting Semantic Activity Labels to Facilitate Consistent Specialization of Abstract Process Activities

Designing business processes from scratch is an intricate and challenging task for process modellers. For this reason, the reuse of process patterns has become an integral part of process modelling in order to deal with recurring design issues in a given domain when modelling new business processes and variants thereof. The specialization of abstract process activities remains a key issue in process pattern reuse. Depending on the intended purpose of process pattern reuse, the specialization of abstract process activities typically ranges from the substitution of abstract process activities with sub-processes to the substitution of activity labels with specialized labels. The specialization of abstract process activities through label specialization has been hardly investigated so far in the business process community. The approach presented in this paper achieves consistent specialization of abstract process activities by ensuring consistent specialization of activity labels through exploitation of semantic activity labels as introduced in previous work. Semantic activity labels encode the linguistic meaning of process activities and thereby facilitate the establishment of consistency criteria based on the implicit semantics captured by activity labels.