Cristina Cabanillas

Predictive Task Monitoring for Business Processes

Information sources providing real-time status of physical objects have drastically increased in recent times. So far, research in business process monitoring has mainly focused on checking the completion of tasks. However, the availability of real-time information allows for a more detailed tracking of individual business tasks. This paper describes a framework for controlling the safe execution of tasks and signalling possible misbehaviours at runtime. It outlines a real use case on smart logistics and the preliminary results of its application.

RALph: A Graphical Notation for Resource Assignments in Business Processes

The business process (BP) resource perspective deals with the management of human as well as non-human resources throughout the process lifecycle. Although it has received increasing attention recently, there exists no graphical notation for it up until now that is both expressive enough to cover well-known resource selection conditions and independent of any BP modelling language. In this paper, we introduce RALph, a graphical notation for the assignment of human resources to BP activities. We define its semantics by mapping this notation to a language that has been formally defined in description logics, which enables its automated analysis. Although we show how RALph can be seamlessly integrated with BPMN, it is noteworthy that the notation is independent of the BP modelling language. Altogether, RALph will foster the visual modelling of the resource perspective in BPs.

RAL: A High-Level User-Oriented Resource Assignment Language for Business Processes

An important task of business process design is the definition of what and how members of an organization are involved in the activities of the business processes developed within it. In this paper we analyse the capabilities of BPMN 2.0, the de-facto standard for business process modelling, in this regard. The conclusion is that, although it provides some mechanisms to assign resources to business process activities, they present several drawbacks. On the one hand, it does not provide a clear way to relate the assignment of resources with a model of the structure of the organization. On the other hand, it relies on XPath as the default language to assign resources to activities. The consequence is that it has limitations regarding the expressiveness of resource assignment expressions. Furthermore, it makes resource assignment not easy to learn and use since XPath has not been designed for that purpose. To overcome these drawbacks we introduce RAL (Resource Assignment Language), a DSL based on a well-known organizational metamodel that can be used together with BPMN 2.0. RAL provides more expressiveness to the resource assignments and it uses a high-level sintaxis defined to be used by technically unskilled users.

Mining the Organisational Perspective in Agile Business Processes

Agile processes depend on human resources, decisions and expert knowledge, and they are especially versatile and comprise rather complex scenarios. Declarative, i.e., rule-based, process models are well-suited for modelling these processes. Although there are several mining techniques to discover such declarative process models from event logs, they put less emphasis on the organisational perspective, which specifies how resources are involved in the activities. As a consequence, the resulting models do not specify who should execute which task and with which constraint (like separation of duties) in mind. In this paper, we propose a process mining approach to discover resource-aware, declarative process models. Our specific contribution is the extraction of complex rules for resource assignment that integrate the control-flow and organisational perspectives. Our experiments demonstrate the expressiveness of the mined rules with a reference to the Workflow Resource Patterns and a real-world use case.

Blockchains for Business Process Management - Challenges and Opportunities

Blockchain technology offers a sizable promise to rethink the way interorganizational business processes are managed because of its potential to realize execution without a central party serving as a single point of trust (and failure). To stimulate research on this promise and the limits thereof, in this article, we outline the challenges and opportunities of blockchain for business process management (BPM). We first reflect how blockchains could be used in the context of the established BPM lifecycle and second how they might become relevant beyond. We conclude our discourse with a summary of seven research directions for investigating the application of blockchain technology in the context of BPM.

A framework for efficiently mining the organisational perspective of business processes

Process mining aims at discovering processes by extracting knowledge from event logs. Such knowledge may refer to different business process perspectives. The organisational perspective deals, among other things, with the assignment of human resources to process activities. Information about the resources that are involved in process activities can be mined from event logs in order to discover resource assignment conditions, which is valuable for process analysis and redesign. Prior process mining approaches in this context present one of the following issues: (i) they are limited to discovering a restricted set of resource assignment conditions; (ii) they do not aim at providing efficient solutions; or (iii) the discovered process models are difficult to read due to the number of assignment conditions included.In this paper we address these problems and develop an efficient and effective process mining framework that provides extensive support for the discovery of patterns related to resource assignment. The framework is validated in terms of performance and applicability. A process mining approach for the organisational perspective is proposed.It supports the discovery of resource assignment patterns and how involvement of resources influences the control-flow.The framework consists of an event log pre-processing phase to increase efficiency.A model post-processing phase improves effectiveness by removing redundant rules.

Towards the Enhancement of Business Process Monitoring for Complex Logistics Chains

Logistics processes have some characteristics which are fundamentally challenging from a business process management perspective. Their execution usually involves multiple parties and information exchanges and has to ensure a certain level of flexibility in order to respond to unexpected events. On the level of monitoring, potential disruptions have to be detected and reactive measures be taken in order to avoid delays and contract penalties. However, current business process management systems do not exactly address these general requirements which call for the integration of techniques from event processing. Unfortunately, activity-based and event-based execution paradigms are not thoroughly in line. In this paper, we untangle conceptual issues in aligning both. We present a set of three challenges in the monitoring of process-oriented complex logistics chains identified based on a real-world scenario consisting of a three-leg intermodal logistics chain for the transportation of goods. Required features that such a monitoring system should provide, as well as related literature referring to these challenges, are also described.

Defining and analysing resource assignments in business processes with RAL

Business process (BP) modelling notations tend to stray their attention from (human) resource management, unlike other aspects such as control flow or even data flow. They not only offer little intuitive languages to assign resources to BP activities, but neither link BPs with the structure of the organization where they are used, so BP models can easily contain errors such as the assignment of resources that do not belong to the organizational model. In this paper we address this problem and define RAL (Resource Assignment Language), a domain-specific language explicitly developed to assign resources to the activities of a BP model. RAL makes BPs aware of organizational structures. Besides, RAL semantics is based on an OWL-DL ontology, which enables the automatic analysis of resource assignment expressions, thus allowing the extraction of information from the resource assignments, and the detection of inconsistencies and assignment conflicts.

Specification and automated design-time analysis of the business process human resource perspective

The human resource perspective of a business process is concerned with the relation between the activities of a process and the actors who take part in them. Unlike other process perspectives, such as control flow, for which many different types of analyses have been proposed, such as finding deadlocks, there is an important gap regarding the human resource perspective. Resource analysis in business processes has not been defined, and only a few analysis operations can be glimpsed in previous approaches. In this paper, we identify and formally define seven design-time analysis operations related to how resources are involved in process activities. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for a wide variety of resource-aware BP models, those analysis operations can be automated by leveraging Description Logic (DL) off-the-shelf reasoners. To this end, we rely on Resource Assignment Language (RAL), a domain-specific language that enables the definition of conditions to select the candidates to participate in a process activity. We provide a complete formal semantics for RAL based on DLs and extend it to address the operations, for which the control flow of the process must also be taken into consideration. A proof-of-concept implementation has been developed and integrated in a system called CRISTAL. As a result, we can give an automatic answer to different questions related to the management of resources in business processes at design time. HighlightsExisting gap on the automated analysis of the business process resource perspective.We define resource analysis based on analysis operations and introduce seven analysis operations.Automated support based on Description Logics for the seven operations at design time.We rely on a very expressive assignment language called RAL for resource selection.Approach implemented and integrated into a tool called CRISTAL.

Priority-Based Human Resource Allocation in Business Processes

In Business Process Management Systems, human resource management typically covers two steps: resource assignment at design time and resource allocation at run time. Although concepts like rolebased assignment often yield several potential performers for an activity, there is a lack of mechanisms for prioritizing them, e.g., according to their skills or current workload. In this paper, we address this research gap. More specifically, we introduce an approach to define resource preferences grounded on a validated, generic user preference model initially developed for semantic web services. Furthermore, we show an implementation of the approach demonstrating its feasibility.