Ksenia Ryndina

Generation of business process models for object life cycle compliance

Business process models usually capture data exchanged betweentasks in terms of objects. These objects are commonly standardizedusing reference data models that prescribe, among other things, allowedobject states. Allowed state transitions can be modeled as objectlife cycles that require compliance of business processes. In this paper, wefirst establish a notion of compliance of a business process model with anobject life cycle. We then propose a technique for generating a compliantbusiness process model from a set of given reference object life cycles.

The Role of Visual Modeling and Model Transformations in Business-driven Development

This paper explores the emerging paradigm of business-driven development, which presupposes a methodology for developing IT solutions that directly satisfy business requirements and needs. At the core of business-driven development are business processes, which are usually modeled by combining graphical and textual notations. During the business-driven development process, business-process models are taken down to the IT level, where they describe the so-called choreography of services in a Service-Oriented Architecture. The derivation of a service choreography based on a business-process model is simple and straightforward for toy examples only-for realistic applications, many challenges at the methodological and technical level have to be solved. This paper explores these challenges and describes selected solutions that have been developed by the research team of the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory.

Consistency of business process models and object life cycles

Business process models and object life cycles can provide two different views on behavior of the same system, requiring that these models are consistent with each other. However, it is difficult to reason about consistency of these two types of models since their relation is not well-understood. We clarify this relation and propose an approach to establishing the required consistency. Object state changes are first made explicit in a business process model and then the process model is used to generate life cycles for each object type used in the process. We define two consistency notions for a process model and an object life cycle and express these in terms of conditions that must hold between a given life cycle and a life cycle generated from the process model.

Improving business process models with reference models in business-driven development

Reference models capture best-practice solutions for a specific industry such as retail, banking, or insurance. The models usually cover the whole range of solution components such as product models, business rules, data models, and service models. Over the past years, business process reference models have gained increasing attention. Process merging is a technique that brings together several process models to create a new process model. In this paper, we introduce process merging for a scenario which focuses on the improvement of an existing AS-IS business process by using a reference process model. We describe an approach that enables a business architect to establish correspondences between two process models in a systematic way and show how these correspondences define concrete refactoring operations that serve to improve the AS-IS model. Category: Industry paper.

Combining Quality Assurance and Model Transformations in Business-Driven Development

Business-driven development is a methodology for developing IT solutions that directly satisfy business requirements. At its core are business processes, which are usually modeled by combining graphical and textual notations. During business-driven development, business process models are taken to the IT level, where they are implemented in a Service-Oriented Architecture. A major challenge in business-driven development is the semantic gap between models captured at the business and the IT level. Model transformations play a major role in bridging this gap. This paper presents a transformation framework for IBM WebSphere Business Modeler that enables programmers to quickly develop in-place model transformations, which are then made available to users of this tool. They address various user needs such as quickly correcting modeling errors, refining a process model, or applying a number of refactoring operations. Transformations are combined with quality assurance techniques, which help users to preserve or improve the correctness of their business process models when applying transformations.

Improving inconsistency resolution with side-effect evaluation and costs

Consistency management is a major requirement in software engineering. Although this problem has attracted significant attention in the literature, support for inconsistency resolution is still not standard for modeling tools. In this paper, we introduce explicit side-effect expressions for each inconsistency resolution and costs for each inconsistency type. This allows a fine-grained evaluation of each possible inconsistency resolution for a particular inconsistent model. We further show how an inconsistency resolution module for a modeling tool can be designed and implemented based on our approach. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach for resolution of inconsistencies between object life cycles and process models.