G. De Michelis

Reengineering a business process with an innovative workflow management system: a case study

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has been proposed as a new approach to facing the challenge of improving the quality of a business process while reducing its costs. Workgroup computing systems can be considered as the best candidates for BPR, since they aim to improve the effectiveness of the group of people collaborating within a work process. In particular workflow management systems seem to offer the best support to a reengineered business process. In this paper we report on a case of BPR. It consists in the application to a real bank procedure of both a new approach to the analysis of work processes (allowing the evaluation of its transaction costs) and a prototype of a Workflow Management System (WMS), allowing an effective handling of procedure breakdowns without forcing the designers to take care of them.

Chaos as coordination technology

The need of supporting office work with suitable computer based tools implies the investigation of the deep aspects of cooperation within the office. Cooperation, to the extent that is made up of communication and coordination, can be fully characterized under the assumption that an office is a special linguistic game, constituted by a set of rules defining the conversations possible within it, continuously changing under the perturbations created by the speech acts its member do performing the conversations. Within this conceptual context, a prototypal software package, CHAOS-1, is presented. CHAOS-1 aims both at supporting the conversations and at improving coordination of the office activities.This paper discusses CHAOS-1 with respect to similar proposals, presents its overall architecture, shows some examples of its use and sketches its new releases under development.

MILNER'S COMMUNICATING SYSTEMS AND PETRI NETS

The comparison between Milner’s CCS and Petri nets leads to prove that CCS defines a subclass of the concurrent systems definable by means of net theory, i.e. the class of systems composed of interacting sequential automata. The proof is based on (the construction of) an isomorphism between Milner’s communicating systems class and a subclass of Petri nets.The paper fully presents the proof for a subclass of communicating systems (where neither value passing nor finite unlimited instances of agents are allowed) and a specific subclass of nets, the SA2 PT class (a restriction of the Superposed Automata nets class). Some hints how to extend the proof to the whole CCS conclude the paper. This result allows to transfer analytic concepts and techniques from a theory to the other, as for example the observation equivalence notion defined inside the CCS. The paper is fully self-consistent.

The communication disciplines of CHAOS

Although Petri’s Communication Disciplines have little influenced the scientific community till now, they offer a powerful theoretical framework for dealing with the pragmatics of human communication.

The GCP Language and Its Implementation

Guarded Communicating Processes is a complete language for distributed applications based on Hoare’s CSP.(1) CSP are an “ambitious attempt to find a single simple solution” to the communication and synchronization problems of concurrent processes, that is, to represent in a single frame semaphores, critical regions, monitors, queues, and so on. They are characterized by some choices: synchronous communication; no shared data among processes; nondeterminism.

Real System Modeling: A Formal But Realistic Approach To Organizational Design

The outlines of a method of system analysis and design particularly oriented to the problems of Public Administration Organizational Systems are presented. This method consider a system, at any level of abstraction, as composed by autonomous interacting processes and builds system models by means of Superposed Automata Nets, a subclass of Predicate Transition Nets.

Program Proving: Exit and Return Jumps in Structured Programs

The inadequacy of goto-free programming languages to express algorithms has clearly been shown in the literature. On the other hand, the axiomatic definition of jumps is rather complex, and there aren’t complete or efficient proposals for it.

An overview of the GCP programming language

This paper presents an overview of GCP (Guarded Communicating Processes), a language for distributed applications programming, which has been defined deriving its control mechanisms from Hoares CSP (with new communication primitives and a new distributed termination convention) and embedding them in a fully defined concurrent programming language. Besides an easy retargetable compiler the GCP environment consists of a configurator/distributor to distribute and activate the processes constituting an application and of a run-time support.

Sulla computazione di funzioni ricorsive

SommarioIn questo articolo introduciamo un Calcolo Funzionale per discutere il problema della computazione delle funzioui definite ricorsivamente.Come è ben noto dalla letteratura, la computazione di una funzione ricorsiva può dare differenti valori, a seconda che sia eseguita con la leftmost-outermost rule, o con la leftmost-innermost rule.Nel calcolo precedentemente menzionato diamo una condizione sufficiente perché la computazione di una funzione dipenda dalla regola di computazione utilizzata.AbstractIn this paper a Function Calculus is introduced in order to discuss the problem of computing recursively defined functions.As it is well known from literature, the computation of a recursive function may give differents values whether executed with the lefmost-outermost rule or with the leftmost-innermost rule.In the above mentioned calculus we give a sufficient condition in order that the computation of a function depends on the computational rule.