Jmem Jan Martijn van der Werf

Conceptual model for online auditing

The independent verification of the right applications of business rules in an information system is a task for auditors. The increasing complexity of information systems, and the high risks associated with violations of business rules, have created the need for Online Auditing Tools. In this paper we sketch a conceptual design for such a tool. The components of the tool are described briefly. The focus is on the database and the conformance checker, which are described in detail. The approach is illustrated with an example and some preliminary case studies from industry.

Separating Compliance Management and Business Process Management

The ever growing set of regulations and laws organizations have to comply to, introduces many new challenges. Current approaches that check for compliance by implementing controls in an existing information system (IS) decrease the maintainability of both the set of compliance rules and the IS. In this position paper, we advocate the separation of the compliance process from the organization’s business processes. We introduce a life cycle for the management of compliance rules. A separate compliance engine is used to define and check compliance rules independent from the existing IS within an organization.

Adaptive workflows for healthcare information systems

Current challenges in Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) include supplying patients with personalized medical information, creating means for efficient information flow between different healthcare providers in order to lower risks of medical errors and increase the quality of care. To address these challenges, the information about patient-related processes, such as currently executed medical protocols, should be made available for medical staff and patients. Existing HIS are mostly data-centered, and therefore cannot provide an adequate solution. To give processes a prominent role in HIS, we apply the adaptive workflow nets framework. This framework allows both healthcare providers and patients to get an insight into the past and current processes, but also foresee possible future developments. It also ensures quality and timing of data communication essential for efficient information flow.

Compositional Service Trees

In the world of Service Oriented Architectures, one deals with networks of cooperating components. A component offers services; to deliver a service it possibly needs services of other components, thus forming a service tree . This tree is built dynamically and not known beforehand. It is hard to verify the behavior of a service tree by using standard verification techniques, because these techniques typically assume a static flattened model. In this paper we model a component by an open Petri net. We give a sufficient condition for proper completion (called soundness) that requires only pairwise checks of the service compositions. We also provide a correctness-by-construction approach for building services trees.

Designing Case Handling Systems

A case handling system is an information system supporting the handling of cases. The (sub) tasks for a particular case are performed by persons or software agents and the result of a task is the updating of the case data. Case handling systems consist of three parts: (1) a workflow engine that executes the process of a case, (2) a document manager that manipulates the case data and (3) a database manager for manipulation of the global data, i.e., the data that is independent of a particular case. In this paper we present a new methodology for the first four phases of the development of a case handling system: (1) user requirements, (2) functional architecture, (3) software architecture, and (4) the prototyping phase. The methodology is supported by a tool consisting of a Petri net based workflow engine, a standard document manager and a standard database system.

Soundness-preserving refinements of service compositions

Soundness is one of the well-studied properties of processes; it denotes that a final state can be reached from every state that is reachable from the initial state. Soundness-preserving refinements are important for enabling the compositional design of systems. n nIn this paper we concentrate on refinements of service compositions. We model service compositions using Petri nets, and consider specific pairs of places that belong to different services. Starting from a sound service composition, we show how to check whether such a pair of places can be refined by another sound service composition, so that soundness is preserved through the refinement.

Construction of asynchronous communicating systems: weak termination guaranteed!

Correctness of asynchronously communicating systems (ACS) is known to be a hard problem, which became even more actual after the introduction of Service Oriented Architectures and Service Oriented Computing. In this paper, we focus on one particular correctness property, namely weak termination: at anymoment of the system execution, at least one option to terminate should be available. We present a compositional method for constructing an ACS that guarantees weak termination. The method allows for refinement of single components, refinement of compositions of components and the creation of new components in the system. For two important classes of ACS, weak termination follows directly from their structure. These classes focus on the concurrency over components and on the implementation of protocols and communicating choices.

When can we trust a third party

Organizations often do not want to reveal the way a product is created or a service is delivered. As a consequence, if two organizations want to cooperate, they contact a trusted third party. Each specifies how it wants to communicate with the other party. The trusted third party then needs to assure that the two organizations cooperate correctly. In this paper, we study requirements on trusted third parties to ensure correct cooperation between the different organizations.

Modelling with history-dependent Petri nets

Most information systems that are driven by process models(e.g., workflow management systems) record events in event logs, alsoknown as transaction logs or audit trails. We consider processes that notonly keep track of their history in a log, but also make decisions basedon this log. Extending our previous work on history-dependent Petrinets we propose and evaluate a methodology for modelling processes bysuch nets and show how history-dependent nets can combine modellingcomfort with analysability.