Felix Flentge

Enabling end-user driven business process composition through programming by example in a Collaborative Task management system

Letting end users tailor business processes can result in business process management support, which is better turned to userspsila needs and organizational changes. However, such tailoring requires not only the userspsila domain expertise but also advanced skills in computer use, which business users mostly lack. The paper presents the design of the collaborative task manager (CTM) prototype which overcomes this limitation and enables end users to become informed participants in business process composition. CTM uses enterprise-wide ldquoprogramming by examplerdquo by exposing common functionalities for personal task management to the end users and tracking their activities to generate end-to-end process execution examples on a central instance. These can be adapted and reused for ad-hoc process support or exported to formal process models, which enables tailoring as collaboration between business users, end-user tailors and developers. The paper finally reports on trial usage of the tool at a partner company.

The ISE Metamodel for Critical Infrastructures

The implementation-service-effect (ISE) metamodel is a general framework for modeling critical infrastructures that can integrate several different perspectives. The metamodel has a technical basis and also provides the abstractions needed for risk assessment and management of critical infrastructures in complex environments. ISE supports an iterative modeling approach that continuously refines models based on new information. By focusing on the services provided by critical infrastructures, the approach bridges the gap between the business and engineering views of critical infrastructures. The technical realization of services is described in the implementation layer of ISE; the effects of the successful (or unsuccessful) delivery of services are described in the effect layer. A sound mathematical foundation provides the basis for analyses ranging from topological evaluations of dependency structures to statistical analyses of simulation results obtained using agent-based models.

Towards a standardised cross-sector information exchange on present risk factors

Information sharing between companies within the field of critical infrastructures seems necessary to reduce the risk of failures. However, there are a couple of factors like sensitivity of the information or the difficulties of cross-sector communication hindering an effective information exchange. Therefore, it is suggested to develop a standardised language for the purpose of cross-sector information exchange that takes these factors into account. The paper presents some concepts for such an information exchange and sketches a Risk Management Language (RML) that could be used for this purpose.

Enabling End Users to Proactively Tailor Underspecified, Human-Centric Business Processes: "Programming by Example" of Weakly-Structured Process Models

Enterprises face the challenge of managing underspecified, human-centric business processes which are executed in distributed teams in a rather informal, ad-hoc manner. This gave hibernating CSCW and ad-hoc workflow research a new push recently. However, there is still the need to clearly perceive end users as the actual drivers of business processes and to enable them to proactively tailor these processes according to their expertise and problem solving strategies. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a prototype for end-user development of weakly-structured process models through email-integrated task management. The presented CTM (Collaborative Task Manager) prototype uses “programming by example” to leverage user experience with standard email and task management applications and to extend user skills towards the definition of reusable process structures. By closely correlating to the actual user work practices and software environment, the tool provides a “gentle slope of complexity” for process tailoring by end users.

Web based evaluation of proactive user interfaces

Usability evaluation of new interface concepts often requires a user study to yield valid results. User studies are however a cost intensive method compared to guideline based usability evaluation. In the AUGUR project we conducted a user study to validate a new interface concept, proactive user interfaces. The method for evaluation we used consists of four steps and relies on leveraging existing tools for realizing each step. These tools can highly automate the data gathering step in the usability study and thereby lower the cost for conducting such a study. In particular they allow for remote participation via a web browser. The obtained data can be analyzed to gain insight into the relation of factors to the three subnotions of usability: efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction as defined in ISO 9241. We applied the developed method to evaluate the proactive user interfaces we develop in the AUGUR project. In the AUGUR project we aim at augmenting existing user interfaces with proactive and multimodal features to enhance the overall usability of the application. In this paper, we also present the results of the study that shows that proactive augmentations are beneficial for the usability of a user interface and serves as a case study for the application of the evaluation method.

Preface to MDSE4AmI 2007

The implementation of AmI applications is a task of tremendous complexity requiring the seamless integration of heterogeneous systems in an open and flexible way while providing the means for adaptivity and context-awareness. Ubiquitous devices have to cooperate to realize smart environments, multimodal user interfaces have to adapt to the available modalities for interaction and context information has to be taken into account. Therefore, new engineering approaches are needed in order to facilitate efficient design, development and deployment of AmI applications.

Modeling temporal dependencies between observed activities

The modeling of parallel activities requires a notation which can represent the temporal dependencies as well as variations of the execution order of the activities. This paper introduces ART (Activity Relation Trees), a notation to describe temporal dependencies between activities. ART is based on ConcurTaskTrees (CTT) that are extended with the means to describe temporal relationships. Furthermore, we present an algorithm that allows to automatically generate ART models from observed examples. Because former approaches for automatic model acquisition were restricted to strictly sequential data and cannot be applied in the case of parallel activities, we developed a method to reduce the problem of automatic modeling of parallel activities to the simpler task of modeling sequential data. By grouping activities and distinguishing different phases we are able to form general descriptions of a scenario that include variations in the execution order. The paper defines all necessary concepts and describes the algorithm in detail. The evaluation of the algorithm shows that precise models can be generated by using only few examples.