Conrad Indiono

Memetic Algorithms for Mining Change Logs in Process Choreographies

The propagation and management of changes in process choreographies has been recently addressed as crucial challenge by several approaches. A change rarely confines itself to a single change, but triggers other changes in different partner processes. Specifically, it has been stated that with an increasing number of partner processes, the risk for transitive propagations and costly negotiations increases as well. In this context, utilizing past change events to learn and analyze the propagation behavior over process choreographies will help avoiding significant costs related to unsuccessful propagations and negotiation failures, of further change requests. This paper aims at the posteriori analysis of change requests in process choreographies by the provision of mining algorithms based on change logs. In particular, a novel implementation of the memetic mining algorithm for change logs, with the appropriate heuristics is presented. The results of the memetic mining algorithm are compared with the results of the actual propagation of the analyzed change events.

Classification and Formalization of Instance-Spanning Constraints in Process-Driven Applications

In process-driven applications, typically, instances share human, computer, and physical resources and hence cannot be executed independently of each other. This necessitates the definition, verification, and enforcement of restrictions and conditions across multiple instances by so called instance-spanning constraints (ISC). ISC might refer to instances of one or several process types or variants. While real-world applications from, e.g., the logistics, manufacturing, and energy domain crave for the support of ISC, only partial solutions can be found. This work provides a systematic ISC classification and formalization that enables the verification of ISC during design and runtime. Based on a collection of 114 ISC from different domains and sources the relevance and feasibility of the presented concepts is shown.

Change Propagation Analysis and Prediction in Process Choreographies

Business process collaborations among multiple partners require particular considerations regarding flexibility and change management. Indeed, each change or process redesign originated by a partner may cause ripple effects on other partners participating in the choreography. Consequently, a change request could spread over partners in an unexpected way with relevant costs due to its transitivity (e.g. in supply chains). In order to avoid costly negotiations or propagation failures, understanding this behavior becomes critical. This paper focuses on analyzing the behavior of change requests in process choreographies, i.e. the change propagation behavior. The input data might be available in two different formats, i.e. as change logs or change propagation logs (CPs). In order to understand the data and to explore potential analysis models and techniques, we employ exploratory data analysis as well as analysis techniques from process mining and change management to simulation data. The results yield the req...

Rule-Based Runtime Monitoring of Instance-Spanning Constraints in Process-Aware Information Systems

Instance-spanning constraints (ISC) constitute a crucial instrument to establish coordination between multiple instances in Process-Aware Information Systems. ISC need to be verified and monitored at design as well as runtime. In this work we propose a rule-based approach for runtime monitoring of ISC. We base our work on the well known Rete algorithm and research ways structure the network in such a way that improves matching speed for ISC. We show through a technical evaluation that (1) a rule-based approach is feasible for performing runtime monitoring of ISC and (2) that the heuristics we extract for structuring the Rete network improve the rule matching speed.

Finding Collective Decisions: Change Negotiation in Collaborative Business Processes

Change propagation has been identified as major concern for process collaborations during the last years. Although changes might become necessary for various reasons, they can often not be kept local, i.e., at one partners side, but must be partly or entirely propagated to one or several other partners. Due to the autonomy of partners in a collaboration, change effects cannot be imposed on the partners, but must be agreed upon in a consensual way. In our model of this collective decision process, we assume that each partner that becomes involved in a negotiation has different alternatives on how a change may be realized, and evaluates these alternatives according to his or her individual costs and benefits utilities. This paper presents models from group decision making that can be applied for handling change negotiations in process collaborations in an efficient and fair way. The theoretical models are evaluated based on a proof-of-concept prototype that integrates an existing implementation for change propagation in process collaborations with change alternatives, utility functions, and group decision models. Based on simulating a realistic setting, the validity of the approach is shown. Our prototype supports the selection of change alternatives for each partner during negotiation that depending on the group decision model used, provides solutions emphasizing efficiency and/or fairness.

Evolution of Instance-Spanning Constraints in Process Aware Information Systems

Business process compliance has been widely addressed resulting in works ranging from proposing compliance patterns to checking and monitoring techniques. However, little attention has been paid to a specific type of constraints known as instance spanning constraints (ISC). Whereas traditional compliance rules define constraints on process models, which are checked separately for each instance, ISC impose constraints that span multiple instances. This paper focuses on ISC evolution and its impact on process compliance. In particular, ISC change operations, as well as change strategies are defined, and the impact on both the ISC monitoring engine and the process instances during run time are analyzed. The concepts are prototypically implemented.

Multi-criteria Decision Analysis for Change Negotiation in Process Collaborations

In a process collaboration, changes rarely confine themselves to a single company, but can spread over the network of partners, resulting in a whole process of negotiation. This paper employs techniques from the domains of multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) and group decision to deal with change negotiation in process collaborations. In particular, it utilizes multi-criteria reasoning to model preferences of collaborators over different criteria. A particular issue in this context is scaling since in a collaboration of heterogeneous partners, identical outcomes might have different meanings for partners. A role-play experiment has been conducted with students from computer science and business administration in order to simulate change negotiation using realistic process collaboration scenarios. The experiment results have been analyzed and in turn, compared to the different normative solutions, representing various approaches to fairness and efficiency of group solutions.

Dynamic Change Propagation for Process Choreography Instances

Business process collaborations realize value chains between different partners and can be implemented by so called process choreographies. Change has become a major driver for costly (re-)negotiations between the participants. Static a priori prediction models exist to calculate the feasibility of a change request prior to negotiation. However, the dynamic or behavioral aspect of choreography changes at the choreography instance level has not been investigated yet, i.e., the question whether a process choreography instance is compliant with the change request and hence allows for acceptance of the change request. This work takes the dynamic perspective and analyzes the impact of a single change request from one partner on the entire (distributed) choreography based on the notion of change regions and public check points. Change strategies are elaborated to ensure choreography instance state compliance. One transaction-based approach is specified using rollback regions. It identifies probabilistically the set of activity nodes to be compensated at all levels of the business collaboration to ensure state compliance. The technical evaluation enables observing the properties of the rollback region.

The First Data Science Challenge at BTW 2017

The 17th Conference on Database Systems for Business, Technology, and Web (BTW2017) of the German Informatics Society (GI) took place in March 2017 at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. A Data Science Challenge was organized for the first time at a BTW conference by the University of Stuttgart and Sponsor IBM. We challenged the participants to solve a data analysis task within one month and present their results at the BTW. In this article, we give an overview of the organizational process surrounding the Challenge, and introduce the task that the participants had to solve. In the subsequent sections, the final four competitor groups describe their approaches and results.