Christoph Czepa

Supporting Structural Consistency Checking in Adaptive Case Management

Adaptive Case Management ACM enables knowledge workers to collaboratively handle unforeseen circumstances by making ad hoc changes of case instances at runtime. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that various structural elements of an ACM case, such as goals, subprocesses and so on, remain consistent over time. To the best of our knowledge, no studies in the literature provide adequate support for structural consistency checking of ACM. In this paper, we introduce a formal categorization of ACMs structural features and potential inconsistencies. Based on this categorization, we develop a novel approach for structural consistency checking of ACM cases. Our approach, based on model checking and graph algorithms, can detect a wide range of inconsistencies of ACMs structural elements. The evaluation of our approach shows reasonable performance and scalability.

Towards Structural Consistency Checking in Adaptive Case Management

This paper proposes structural consistency checking for Adaptive Case Management (ACM). Structures such as a hierarchical organization of business goals and dependencies among tasks are either created at design time or evolve over time while working on cases. In this paper, we identify structures specific to current ACM systems (as opposed to other BPM systems), discuss which inconsistencies can occur, and outline how to discover these issues through model checking and graph algorithms.

Enabling Flexibility of Business Processes Using Compliance Rules: The Case of Mobiliar

(a) Situation faced: Insurance case work can follow established procedures only to a certain degree, as the work depends upon experienced knowledge workers who decide the best solutions for their clients. To produce quality documents in such a knowledge-intensive environment, business users of Die Mobiliar, the oldest private insurance company in Switzerland, were guided by a wizard application that enabled them to compose insurance documents from predefined building blocks in a series of pre-defined steps. As these steps were hardcoded into the wizard application, the processes could not adapt quickly enough to accommodate new insurance products and associated documentation. Rapidly changing insurance markets produce new types of documents daily, so business users must react flexibly to client requests. Although fully automated processes can be defined when sufficient process knowledge exists, they seriously hinder the innovation and business agility that is critical in insurance markets. (b) Action taken: To overcome this problem, Die Mobiliar uses the Papyrus Communication and Process Platform (http://www.isis-papyrus.com/e15/pages/software/platform-concept.html) as the basis for its customized “Mobiliar Korrespondenz System” (MKS, Mobiliar Correspondence System), with full functionality for online interactive business document production (ISIS Papyrus). Our approach combines automatically executed business compliance rules with process redesign to provide the flexibility that is essential for insurance processes. The original processes are split into reusable sub-processes, accompanied by a set of ad hoc tasks that the business users can activate at runtime to meet clients’ emergent requirements. A set of compliance rules guarantees that the process conforms to corporate and regulatory standards. (c) Results achieved: The business compliance rule approach has two primary benefits: (i) company management has a process that is well-documented and provably compliant, and (ii) the business users can respond flexibly to their clients’ needs within the boundaries of defined compliance rules, thus improving the customer experience. The flexibility achieved by this approach allows business users to adapt their insurance processes, an advantage from which the whole insurance industry can benefit. The redesigned process with few reusable core elements, combination with a set of ad hoc tasks, decreases the number of process templates (wizard processes) that are required to handle unpredictable situations. A smaller template library also reduces maintenance efforts for business administrators. (d) Lessons learned: Rigid process modeling is not suitable for highly dynamic business domains, like the insurance industry, that are moving into the digital era. Instead, a hybrid of declarative and imperative modeling is best suited to such domains. Our approach provides a maximum of flexibility within mandated constraints, enabling businesses to adapt to changing market requirements with minimal involvement by IT departments. In order to set expectations properly, the use of the two modeling types should be transparent to business users. The adoption of the new approach happens gradually to cope with business considerations like the integration of compliance checking into Die Mobiliar’s production system.

Towards a Compliance Support Framework for Adaptive Case Management

Current Adaptive Case Management (ACM) solutions are strong in flexibility, but business users must still meet compliance rules stemming from sources such as laws (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley Act), standards (e.g., ISO 45001) and best practices (e.g., ITIL). This paper presents a framework on how to enable support for compliance in the context of ACM by constraints. Since ACM applications undergo constant change, there must be ways to introduce compliance rules on the fly. Currently, constraints (and similar alternative solutions) are predominately maintained by technical users, which results in long maintenance cycles. Our framework aims at enabling faster adoption of changing compliance requirements, both explicitly by enabling non-technical users (knowledge workers) to define and adapt constraints, and implicitly by learning from the decisions taken by other knowledge workers during case enactments. The former is achieved by supporting domain knowledge, maintained in an ontology. The latter is supported by a recommendation approach that enables an automated knowledge transfer between knowledge workers by propagating tacit knowledge, best practices, and the handling of constraints and their violations.

Ontology-Based Behavioral Constraint Authoring

A major approach for formalizing business policies or compliance rules (e.g., stemming from regulatory laws or standards) are behavioral constraints. Flexible business process management approaches such as Adaptive Case Management provide business users the necessary freedom to react to unforeseeable circumstances by ad-hoc changes, but behavioral constraints are often defined and maintained on a technical level which is inaccessible for business users. Consequently, long update cycles of these constraints might result in the enactment of obsolete, incomplete or faulty constraints which hinder the work of the business user instead of supporting it. In this paper, an ontology-based approach for defining and maintaining behavioral constraints in the context of flexible business processes is proposed. The approach aims at enabling business users to take active part in the creation and maintenance of behavioral constraints. The practical applicability of the approach is discussed by means of a realistic scenario on compliance in the context of renovation, repairs, and maintenance of buildings.

Towards an energy-efficient attention-aware mobile video player with sensor and face detection support

When watching video in a mobile environment, many distractions can draw the attention of the user away from the terminal, e.g., a smartphone. The power consumed by the phone during video playback is wasted in case the user is not watching. In this paper, we present an interactive video player allowing to temporarily interrupt the playback when the user is looking away, and resume it when the user starts looking at the phone again. In order to detect user inattention, we exploit the front-facing camera embedded in most current smartphones as image source for face detections. We analyze the power consumption of the phone when running our interactive video player in controlled and realistic scenarios, and study the energy savings induced by the attention-aware playback interruption. Additionally, we study the influence of video bitrate and content on power consumption. Finally, we propose a cloud-based approach in which the image captured by the front camera is sent to a server, which performs the face detection. We show that the power savings are significant using this approach, and can compensate the consumption added by the increased wireless traffic.

Reduction techniques for efficient behavioral model checking in adaptive case management

Case models in Adaptive Case Management (ACM) are business process models ranging from unstructured over semi-structured to structured process models. Due to this versatility, both industry and academia show growing interest in this approach. This paper discusses a model checking approach for the behavioral verification of ACM case models. To counteract the high computational demands of model checking techniques, our approach includes state space reduction techniques as a preprocessing step before state-transition system generation. Consequently, the problem size is decreased, which decreases the computational demands needed by the subsequent model checking as well. An evaluation of the approach with a large set of LTL specifications on two real-world case models, which are representative for semi-structured and structured process models and realistic in size, shows an acceptable performance of the proposed approach.

Lightweight approach for seamless modeling of process flows in case management models

Case management models are business process models that allow a great degree of flexibility at runtime by design. In contrast to flow-driven business processes (e.g., BPMN, EPC, UML activity diagrams), case management models primarily describe a business process by tasks, goals (i.e., milestones), stages, and dependencies between them. However, flow-driven processes are still often required and relevant in practice. In the recent case management standard CMMN (Case Management Model and Notation), support for process flows is offered by referencing BPMN processes. This results in a conceptual break between case elements and those in such subprocesses, so that dependencies from and to elements contained in flow-driven processes are unsupported. Moreover, case designers and other involved stakeholders are required to have substantial knowledge of not only case modeling but also of flow-driven business process modeling, which makes it overly complex. To counteract these current limitations, this paper proposes a lightweight and seamless integration of process flows in case management modeling as a first class citizen. Just a single new element, the Flow Dependency, in combination with existing case elements, enables support for fully integrated process flows in case models. Although the approach is that lightweight, an evaluation based on workflow patterns shows its high degree of expressiveness.

An Ontology-Based Approach for Defining Compliance Rules by Knowledge Workers in Adaptive Case Management - A Repair Service Management Case

Empowering knowledge workers (KWs) to act more efficiently and flexibly in unpredictable situations is the main focus of Adaptive Case Management (ACM), although ad hoc actions at runtime shall not violate the consistency and compliance of an on-going case. In this paper we discuss how business constraints stemming from regulatory laws or standards are transferred from textual sources to formal specifications in the form of compliance rule objects relating to ACM objects. In order to mitigate the knowledge barriers between business and IT, we apply an ontology-based solution allowing KWs to define compliance rules from a pure business perspective using domain-specific terms. We demonstrate the implementation using a repair service case and discuss the benefit of our approach for the sake of administration of business aspects by KWs without IT involvement.

Embracing Process Compliance and Flexibility Through Behavioral Consistency Checking in ACM

Enabling flexibility in unpredictable situations with ad hoc actions decided at runtime by knowledge workers is the main focus of Adaptive Case Management (ACM) systems. However, ad hoc actions added during case execution and ACM templates prepared at design time need to be within the boundaries defined by business constraints, company regulations and legal systems. In this paper we report our experience in addressing this challenge by using model checking and runtime monitoring techniques for behavioral consistency checking that can handle both ACM aspects: support by means of predefined process templates and high flexibility by allowing ad hoc actions at runtime. Our study is conducted using a practical ACM system for repair service management handling different customer requirements under diverse compliance and law regulations.