Fabiana Fournier

Business artifacts with guard-stage-milestone lifecycles: managing artifact interactions with conditions and events

A promising approach to managing business operations is based on business artifacts, a.k.a. business entities (with lifecycles). These are key conceptual entities that are central to guiding the operations of a business, and whose content changes as they move through those operations. An artifact type includes both an information model that captures all of the business-relevant data about entities of that type, and a lifecycle model, that specifies the possible ways an entity of that type might progress through the business. Two recent papers have introduced and studied the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) meta-model for artifact lifecycles. GSM lifecycles are substantially more declarative than the finite state machine variants studied in most previous work, and support hierarchy and parallelism within a single artifact instance. This paper presents the formal operational semantics of GSM, with an emphasis on how interaction between artifact instances is supported. Such interactions are supported both through testing of conditions against the artifact instances, and through events stemming from changes in artifact instances. Building on a previous result for the single artifact instance case, a key result here shows the equivalence of three different formulations of the GSM semantics for artifact instance interaction. One formulation is based on incremental application of ECA-like rules, one is based on two mathematical properties, and one is based on the use of first-order logic formulas.

Introducing the guard-stage-milestone approach for specifying business entity lifecycles

A promising approach to managing business operations is based on business entities with lifecycles (BELs) (a.k.a. business artifacts), i.e., key conceptual entities that are central to guiding the operations of a business, and whose content changes as they move through those operations. A BEL type includes both an information model that captures, in either materialized or virtual form, all of the business-relevant data about entities of that type, and a lifecycle model, that specifies the possible ways an entity of that type might progress through the business by responding to events and invoking services, including human activities. Most previous work on BELs has focused on the use of lifecycle models based on variants of finite state machines. This paper introduces the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) meta-model for lifecycles, which is an evolution of the previous work on BELs. GSM lifecycles are substantially more declarative than the finite state machine variants, and support hierarchy and parallelism within a single entity instance. The GSM operational semantics are based on a form of Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules, and provide a basis for formal verification and reasoning. This paper provides an informal, preliminary introduction to the GSM approach, and briefly overviews selected research directions.

Proactive event processing in action: a case study on the proactive management of transport processes (industry article)

Proactive event processing constitutes the next phase in the evolution of complex event processing. Proactive event processing makes it possible to anticipate potential issues during process execution and thereby enables proactive process management. One industry domain that can expect relevant benefits from applying proactive event processing is transportation. Transportation companies face numerous stochastic issues when managing the shipment of goods. One such issue faced in airfreight is the exact volume, weight, and number of pieces that a shipper wants to have shipped. Because of the high cost of air shipments, discrepancies between what has been booked by a shipper and the actual volume that is delivered impose costs that create problems for all participants in a shipment. One potential approach to addressing this problem is to use real-time monitoring and proactive alerting to assist air freight companies in anticipating actual delivered weights, volumes, and piece counts. In this paper we address the issue of cargo shipments by leveraging real-time monitoring data collected from an industry-standard monitoring system of a large freight forwarding company. Our evidence indicates that by using a novel proactive event-driven software engine, prediction about the weight of shipments can be developed and used in a proactive manner to assist air freight planners in making better estimates and plans for the shipment of goods. We demonstrate that through the use of this proactive approach, predictions concerning over and under-weight loads can be made days in advance of a shipment, thus enabling the air freight planner to optimize their load plans and thus maximize the revenue that they generate from shipments.

Scalable Proactive Event-Driven Decision Making

This paper proposes a methodology for proactive event-driven decision making. Proper decisions are made by forecasting events prior to their occurrence. Motivation for proactive decision making stems from social and economic factors, and is based on the fact that prevention is often more effective than the cure. The decisions are made in real time and require swift and immediate processing of Big Data, that is, extremely large amounts of noisy data flooding in from various locations, as well as historical data. The methodology will recognize and forecast opportunities and threats, making the decision to capitalize on the opportunities and mitigate the threats. This will be explained through user-interaction and the decisions of human operators, in order to ultimately facilitate proactive decision making.

From Business Architecture to SOA Realization Using MDD

One of the major challenges in todays complex business environment is the delivery of a complete solution from business architecture design downstream to SOA IT realization. The IBM Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA) methodology attempts to address this objective. Our project captures information from business architecture design and presents this information in a graphical user interface for its later utilization by the solution development team, compliant to the SOMA methodology. Our model-driven development (MDD) cycle consists of modeling with XML Schema Definition (XSD), generating code with Eclipse Model Framework (EMF) and Eclipse Graphical Model Framework (GMF), customizing the code, and testing the solution. The tool was tested on a supply chain management scenario. The results demonstrated the feasibility of capturing business design and using the artifacts for IT realization with MDD. Our overall MDD experience is discussed.

FERARI: A Prototype for Complex Event Processing over Streaming Multi-cloud Platforms

In this demo, we present FERARI, a prototype that enables real-time Complex Event Processing (CEP) for large volume event data streams over distributed topologies. Our prototype constitutes, to our knowledge, the first complete, multi-cloud based end-to-end CEP solution incorporating: a) a user-friendly, web-based query authoring tool, (b) a powerful CEP engine implemented on top of a streaming cloud platform, (c) a CEP optimizer that chooses the best query execution plan with respect to low latency and/or reduced inter-cloud communication burden, and (d) a query analytics dashboard encompassing graph and map visualization tools to provide a holistic picture with respect to the detected complex events to final stakeholders. As a proof-of-concept, we apply FERARI to enable mobile fraud detection over real, properly anonymized, telecommunication data from T-Hrvatski Telekom network in Croatia.

A Prototype for Credit Card Fraud Management: Industry Paper

To prevent problems and capitalise on opportunities before they even occur, the research project SPEEDD proposed a methodology, and developed a prototype for proactive event-driven decisionmaking. We present the application of this methodology to credit card fraud management. The machine learning component of the SPEEDD prototype supports the online construction of fraud patterns, allowing it to efficiently adapt to the continuously changing fraud types. Moreover, the user interface of the prototype enables fraud analysts to make the most out of the results of automation (complex event processing) and thus reach informed decisions. Unlike most academic research on credit card fraud management, the assessment of the prototype (components) is based on representative transaction datasets, allowing for a realistic evaluation.

A Top-Down Approach from Service Centers to Business Processes

Business service centers (BSC) design a framework for defining non-overlapping, independent, reusable, cost-effective business centers that provide business services. Business services define the way service centers interact and exchange information and assets to achieve business goals. BSC modeling offers many advantages over traditional techniques, such as reuse, simplicity, implementation autonomy, and responsiveness. On the other hand, defining and modeling business processes (BP) is a critical factor in improving business performance. We propose a top-down approach from the business level to the operational level, taking advantages of both BSC and BP approaches. Using the guidelines described in this framework, business designers can use both BSC and BP techniques to provide an end-to-end view of business operations. In a climate of constant and unpredictable change, synergy between process thinking and service center thinking becomes essential to the success of enterprises.

A Method for Service Center Architecture Based on Industry Standards

Component Business Modeling (CBM) designs a framework for defining non-overlapping, independent, reusable, cost-effective business components or service centers that provide business services. CBM is gaining broad acceptance in todays marketplace. On the other hand, compliance with industry standards is becoming an imperative in todays enterprises. We propose a bottom-up method for deriving business components from industry standards, based on the artifact-centric approach. In a climate of constant and unpredictable change, alignment between service centers and industry standards becomes essential to the success of enterprises.

Calculating the Business Importance of Entities in a Service-Oriented Enterprise

Component business modeling (CBM) serves as a powerful analytical framework for reasoning about the business as a set of business components that collaborate through the provision and consumption of business services. This paper proposes and illustrates a method to calculate the relative importance of the entities that make up a componentized enterprise architecture. The proposed method includes a formal definition of the importance of each entity in the business architecture calculated from the high level business values.