Anis Boubaker

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.

Analyzing program dependencies in Java EE applications

Program dependency artifacts such as call graphs help support a number of software engineering tasks such as software mining, program understanding, debugging, feature location, software maintenance and evolution. Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) applications represent a significant part of the recent legacy applications, and we are interested in modernizing them. This modernization involves, among other things, analyzing dependencies between their various components/tiers. JEE applications tend to be multilanguage, rely on JEE container services, and make extensive use of late binding techniques-all of which makes finding such dependencies difficult. In this paper, we describe some of these difficulties and how we addressed them to build a dependency call graph. We developed our tool called DeJEE (Dependencies in JEE) as an Eclipse plug-in. We applied DeJEE on two open-source JEE applications: Java PetStore and JSP Blog. The results show that DeJEE is able to identify different types of JEE dependencies.

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.

Context Aware Customer Experience Management: A Development Framework Based on Ontologies and Computational Intelligence

Customer experience management (CEM) denotes a set of practices, processes, and tools, that aim at personalizing customer’s interactions with a company according to customer’s needs and desires (Weijters et al., J Serv Res 10(1):3–21, 2007 [29]). E-business specialists have long realized the potential of ubiquitous computing to develop context-aware CEM applications (CA-CEM), and have been imagining CA-CEM scenarios that exploit a rich combination of sensor data, customer profile data, and historical data about the customer’s interactions with his environment. However, to realize this potential, e-commerce tool vendors need to figure out which software functionalities to incorporate into their products that their customers (e.g. retailers) could use/configure to build CA-CEM solutions. We propose to provide such functionalities in the form of an application framework within which CA-CEM functionalities can be specified, designed, and implemented. Our framework relies on, (1) a cognitive modeling of the purchasing process, identifying potential touchpoints between sellers and buyers, and relevant influence factors, (2) an ontology to represent relevant information about consumer categories, property types, products, and promotional material, (3) computational intelligence techniques to compute consumer- or category-specific property values, and (4) approximate reasoning algorithms to implement some of the CEM functionalities. In this paper, we present the principles underlying our framework, and outline steps for using the framework for particular purchase scenarios. We conclude by discussing directions for future research.

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.