Nahla Haddar

Literature review of reuse in business process modeling

Business process models play an important role in the analysis and improvement of the performance of an enterprise. Evidently, the quality of a business process model has a direct effect on the business performance. This evidence has motivated both the academic and industrial communities to look for suitable methods for creating good quality business process models. In particular, there is a wide agreement that reuse can accelerate the design process and produce high quality solutions by adopting best practices and agreed-up-on solutions. However, faced with various types of reusable artifacts, business process designers need a set of criteria to determine which type would suit best their needs and design context. To assist designers in their choice, we first present a set of criteria influencing the design phase in terms of effort required and the quality of the resulting model. Secondly, we use this set of criteria to present a state of the art on the most significant reusable design artifacts.

A Framework for Data-Driven Workflow Management: Modeling, Verification and Execution

In recent years, many data-driven workflow modeling approaches has been developed, but none of them can insure data integration, process verification and automatic data-driven execution in a comprehensive way. Based on these needs, we introduced, in previous works, a data-driven approach for workflow modeling and execution. In this paper, we extend our approach to ensure a correct definition and execution of our workflow model, and we implement this extension in our Framework Opus.

Implementation of a Data-driven Workflow Management System

In this paper, we present an approach for data-driven workflow modeling based on Petri Net model. The conceived workflow process can be analysed to verify its correctness before implementation. This workflow modeling approach has been implemented into a workflow management system that provides a set of graphical interfaces to model and execute the business process tasks.

A data-centric approach to manage business processes

We proposed, in previous works, a business process execution language for data-driven workflow modeling, verification, and execution; the proposed model can present both control flow and shared data in workflow processes. It can be analyzed to verify its correctness before its deployment. In this paper, we are going to improve the semantics of our approach to allow better integration between data and control flow, and between the workflow and its external environment (such as relational databases and XML documents). We are also going to extend our approach to generate multidimensional data models, namely OLAP hypercubes, from data handled by the workflow, in order to provide synthetic view of data for decision makers.

Opus framework: A proof-of-concept implementation

In Opus project, basic requirements of data-driven processes were supported by an advanced framework. In this paper, we elucidate a proof-of-concept prototype implementing the fundamental concepts of the Opus framework.

An integrated modelling approach for complex applications and distributed information systems

Abstract Nowadays, co-operation is one of the main fields of interest in many domains dealing with information and data representation and treatment (databases, information systems, knowledge bases, production management, etc.). This paper presents an approach and some principles to model the co-operation in complex applications and information systems development. This co-operation is realised by splitting a complex application to some sub-applications each of which is specified using an object-oriented method. The novelty of the approach is mainly the use of a unification model from which the co-operation and integration process is started. The need of a framework for the co-operation in the field of modelling is absolute mainly because of new applications complexity and the variety of data they model, use and share.

An Automated Method for the Construction of Semantic Business Process Patterns

The effectiveness of reuse in the development of software prompted researchers to look for reuse techniques for business process modelling. Indeed, a variety of reusable business artefact types has been proposed during the last decade. Among the recently proposed reuse artefact types, semantic business process patterns (SB2Ps) offer process patterns that encapsulate knowledge and commonly used practices in a particular domain. The design using an SB2P provides for the adaptation of these practices and it offers guidance on possible variations. This paper presents an automated method to construct SB2P starting from a set of process models in a given domain. The proposed method has the merit of accounting for the semantic, structural and behavioural information of the initial models. In addition, it produces process patterns where common fragments are distinguished from variation points, which assists business process designers in reusing an SB2P to meet their requirements. The method is illustrated through a case study in the cost accounting domain.

Business Entity Warehouse: A New Design Method for Decision Support Systems from Business Entities

Current business intelligence applications and most researches on enterprise performance analysis focus on one part of the business in isolation, the data produced from either the information system or the business process. One the one hand, such single perspective of the correlated data may produce incomplete or biased results. On the other hand, the integration of both data categories faces several challenges inherent to the differences in their semantics, structures and separate storage. To overcome these challenges, we herein propose the concept of business entity warehouse which builds a decision support system based on business entities. The business entity concept was introduced in the information system domain to bring together business operations and business data in a natural way. The business entity warehouse we introduce offers an integrated view of the four business perspectives of the enterprise (functional, behavioural, informational and organizational), and it provides for the analysis of the influence of the business process on the transactional data and vice versa. This paper presents a method to construct business entity warehouses from business entities extracted from IS and business process models.

GSM model construction from enterprise models

Business process analysis is an essential tool to assess how well a business is meeting its goals. However, the process analysis phase may fail in some cases because it focuses either on the data perspective and ignores business activities, or on the functional and behavioral perspectives of the business process and overlooks the data. Indeed, traditional analysis approaches are based on models that do not represent all of these business process perspectives together. Recently, Entity-Centric Modeling has been proposed as a promising approach for the design of business processes based on so-called business entities. It aims to bring together business goals, business operations and business data in a natural way. In this paper, we propose a method to design an enterprise view based on business entities in order to bring together data and processes in a coherent and consistent way. The constructed view provides for an integrated analysis of data and processes. Our method takes as input a domain class diagram of the enterprise information system and a BPMN model representing its business process model, and it constructs a business entity model using the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) language.

Integration of Object-Z class diagrams specifications

Distributed design of an information system consists in designing separately different parts of the system and in integrating the resulting models into a single one. To achieve the integration, similarities and conflicts between models are to be detected and resolved. This requires a precise representation of models which we cannot obtain unless we use a formal specification language. We propose to specify the conceptual representations in Object-Z and to determine semantic correspondences between model elements by considering three criteria: linguistic criterion attached to element names, structural criterion attached to object structure and dynamic criterion attached to object behavior. From time criteria, we formulate a set of integration rules which lead to fuse the models into a global one.