Hugo Ordoñez

Grouping of business processes models based on an incremental clustering algorithm using fuzzy similarity and multimodal search

A model for searching business processes, based on a multimodal approach that integrates textual and structural information.A clustering mechanism that uses a similarity function based on fuzzy logic for grouping search results.Evaluation of search method using internal quality assessment and external assessment based on human criteria. Nowadays, many companies standardize their operations through Business Process (BP), which are stored in repositories and reused when new functionalities are required. However, finding specific processes may become a cumbersome task due to the large size of these repositories. This paper presents MulTimodalGroup, a model for grouping and searching business processes. The grouping mechanism is built upon a clustering algorithm that uses a similarity function based on fuzzy logic; this grouping is performed using the results of each user request. By its part, the search is based on a multimodal representation that integrates textual and structural information of BP. The assessment of the proposed model was carried out in two phases: 1) internal quality assessment of groups and 2) external assessment of the created groups compared with an ideal set of groups. The assessment was performed using a closed BP collection designed collaboratively by 59 experts. The experimental results in each phase are promising and evidence the validity of the proposed model.

Business Processes Retrieval based on Multimodal Search and Lingo Clustering Algorithm

This paper presents a model for searching and grouping of business process models. To search business process models, the model contains a module for multimodal indexing that takes into account textual and structural information of models. To group models, an adaptation of the Lingo algorithm was used; it is based on singular value decomposition and frequent phrases extracted from the description (textual and structural information) of the business process models retrieved according to a query. The evaluation of model was conducted by executing the search process on a closed test-collection built collaboratively, that containing 146 business process models, and comparing the results with a set of relevant business process models obtained from an evaluation issued by 59 experts. Measures of relevance such as graded precision and recall shown promising results in the search process, as well as the quality assessment of the sets formed by the grouping process.

Dynamic Reconfiguration of Composite Convergent Services Supported by Multimodal Search

Composite convergent services integrate a set of functionalities from Web and Telecommunication domains. Due to the big amount of available functionalities, automation of composition process is required in many fields. However, automated composition is not feasible in practice if reconfiguration mechanisms are not considered. This paper presents a novel approach for dynamic reconfiguration of convergent services that replaces malfunctioning regions of composite convergent services considering user preferences. In order to replace the regions of services, a multimodal search is performed. Our contributions are: a model for representing composite convergent services and a region-based algorithm for reconfiguring services supported by multimodal search.

An Impact Study of Business Process Models for Requirements Elicitation in XP

Many communication problems may appear during requirements elicitation causing that final products do not accomplish client expectations. This paper analyzes the impact of using business processes management notation (BPMN) instead of user stories during requirements analysis in agile methodologies. For analyzing the effectiveness of our approach, we compare the use of user stories vs. BP models in eleven software projects during requirements elicitation phase. Experiments evidence that BPMN models improve quality and quantity of information collected during requirements elicitation and ease that clients specify clearly their needs and business goals.

Collaborative grouping of business process models

This paper presents a collaborative platform that allows a set of judges (evaluators) to form business process (BP) groups based on the relationship of a users query with the BPs stored in a repository and the relevant results to that query. Queries are expressed as complete BP and are presented to the evaluators in order to allow them to form groups of BP taking into account similarity relationships. Additionally, each evaluator can compare the concordance or discordance of his results with relevance judgments issued by other evaluators; in this way evaluator can collaborate in the global evaluation process or change his evaluations. Results of the evaluation can be used to assess the quality of the results retrieved by an automatic BP similarity tool. The proposed platform was evaluated with a set of 54 users and results are promising.

MultiSearchBP: Entorno para búsqueda y agrupación de modelos de procesos de negocio

Resumen—El articulo presenta un entorno para busqueda y agrupacion de procesos de negocio denominado MultiSearchBP. Es basado en una arquitectura de tres niveles, que comprende el nivel de presentacion, nivel de negocios (analisis estructural, la indizacion, busqueda y agrupacion) y el nivel de almacenamiento. El proceso de busqueda se realiza en un repositorio que contiene 146 modelos de procesos de negocio (BP). Los procesos de indizacion y de consulta son similares a los del modelo de espacio vectorial utilizado en la recuperacion de informacion, y el proceso de agrupacion utiliza dos algoritmos de agrupacion (Lingo y STC). MultiSearchBP utiliza una representacion multimodal de los BP. Tambien se presenta un proceso de evaluacion experimental para considerar los juicios de ocho expertos evaluadores a partir de un conjunto de los valores de similitud obtenidos de comparaciones manuales efectuados con anterioridad sobre los modelos de BP almacenados en el repositorio. Las medidas utilizadas fueron la precision gradual y el recall gradual. Los resultados muestran una precision alta.

Collaborative Evaluation to Build Closed Repositories on Business Process Models

Nowadays, many companies define, model and use business processes (BP) for several tasks. BP management has become an important research area and researchers have focused their attention on the development of mechanisms for searching BP models on repositories. Despite the positive results of the current mechanisms, there is no defined collaborative methodology to create a closed repository evaluation for these search mechanisms. This kind of repository contains some closed BP predefined lists representing queries and ideal answers to these queries with the most relevant BPs based on a set of evaluation metrics. This paper describes a methodology for creating such repositories. To apply the proposed methodology, we built a Web tool that allows to a set of evaluators to make relevance judgments in a collaborative way for each one of the items returned according to predefined queries. The evaluation metrics used can measure the consensus degree in the results, therefore confirming the methodology feasibility to create an open access, scalable and expandable closed BP repository with new BP models that can be reusable in future research.

Multimodal Indexing and Search of Business Processes Based on Cumulative and Continuous N-Grams

Reuse of business processes may contribute to the efficient deployment of new services. However, due to the large volume of process repositories, finding a particular process may become a difficult task. Most of the existing works in processes search are focused on textual information and graph matching. This paper presents a multimodal indexing and search model of business processes based on cumulative and continuous n–grams. The present method considers linguistic and behavior information represented as codebooks. Codebooks describe structural components based on the n-gram concept. Obtained results outperform the precision, recall and F-Measure of previous approaches considerably.

Improving business process retrieval using categorization and multimodal search

Enterprises use repositories of Business Processes to standardize and adapt their operations in order to reuse them for new functional requirements. However, a disorganized growth of these repositories have hampered the search of Business Processes which is fundamental for reusing them. In this paper an approach for organizing and searching Business Processes is proposed, which is composed of two phases: First, an automatic and semantic categorization phase to classify Business Processes based on their functionality, and second a multimodal search phase in order to rank Business Processes based on structural and textual features. The proposed approach was tested in an evaluation over a closed repository collaboratively built by 20 expert evaluators. Initially, evaluators were asked to rate categories assigned by our approach to each Business Process in order to assess our results against the user perspective. Later, evaluators were asked to compare six queries against the repository in order to obtain a set of relevant Business Processes for each query. With these results, precision, recall and F-measure were calculated to evaluate the relevance and ranking concordance of the proposed approach against state-of-the-art algorithms for Business Process similarity search. Additionally, we applied the Friedman and the Wilcoxon signed rank tests over the results obtained for each query over precision and F-measure in order to evaluate the statistically significance of these results. The results obtained demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach for categorizing and retrieving Business Processes.

Optimization of the Inception Deck Technique for Eliciting Requirements in SCRUM Through Business Process Models.

Some techniques such as Inception Deck are used in software elicitation phase of the agile methodologies to unify the vision of all the stakeholders. This vision is stored in artifacts such as user stories. However, these artifacts are written in natural language and may, therefore, be ambiguous. Regarding SCRUM, the primary artifact is the product backlog, which in turn contains user stories. This paper describes how software development process with SCRUM can be improved by replacing the user stories with business process models to solve the ambiguity issue.