Piyawadee Sukaviriya

Business artifacts with guard-stage-milestone lifecycles: managing artifact interactions with conditions and events

A promising approach to managing business operations is based on business artifacts, a.k.a. business entities (with lifecycles). These are key conceptual entities that are central to guiding the operations of a business, and whose content changes as they move through those operations. An artifact type includes both an information model that captures all of the business-relevant data about entities of that type, and a lifecycle model, that specifies the possible ways an entity of that type might progress through the business. Two recent papers have introduced and studied the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) meta-model for artifact lifecycles. GSM lifecycles are substantially more declarative than the finite state machine variants studied in most previous work, and support hierarchy and parallelism within a single artifact instance. This paper presents the formal operational semantics of GSM, with an emphasis on how interaction between artifact instances is supported. Such interactions are supported both through testing of conditions against the artifact instances, and through events stemming from changes in artifact instances. Building on a previous result for the single artifact instance case, a key result here shows the equivalence of three different formulations of the GSM semantics for artifact instance interaction. One formulation is based on incremental application of ECA-like rules, one is based on two mathematical properties, and one is based on the use of first-order logic formulas.

Introducing the guard-stage-milestone approach for specifying business entity lifecycles

A promising approach to managing business operations is based on business entities with lifecycles (BELs) (a.k.a. business artifacts), i.e., key conceptual entities that are central to guiding the operations of a business, and whose content changes as they move through those operations. A BEL type includes both an information model that captures, in either materialized or virtual form, all of the business-relevant data about entities of that type, and a lifecycle model, that specifies the possible ways an entity of that type might progress through the business by responding to events and invoking services, including human activities. Most previous work on BELs has focused on the use of lifecycle models based on variants of finite state machines. This paper introduces the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) meta-model for lifecycles, which is an evolution of the previous work on BELs. GSM lifecycles are substantially more declarative than the finite state machine variants, and support hierarchy and parallelism within a single entity instance. The GSM operational semantics are based on a form of Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules, and provide a basis for formal verification and reasoning. This paper provides an informal, preliminary introduction to the GSM approach, and briefly overviews selected research directions.

The dubuque electricity portal: evaluation of a city-scale residential electricity consumption feedback system

This paper describes the Dubuque Electricity Portal, a city-scale system aimed at supporting voluntary reductions of electricity consumption. The Portal provided each household with fine-grained feedback on its electricity use, as well as using incentives, comparisons, and goal setting to encourage conservation. Logs, a survey and interviews were used to evaluate the user experience of the Portal during a 20-week pilot with 765 volunteer households. Although the volunteers had already made a wide range of changes to conserve electricity prior to the pilot, those who used the Portal decreased their electricity use by about 3.7%. They also reported increased understanding of their usage, and reported taking an array of actions - both changing their behavior and their electricity infrastructure. The paper discusses the experience of the systems users, and describes challenges for the design of ECF systems, including balancing accessibility and security, a preference for time-based visualizations, and the advisability of multiple modes of feedback, incentives and information presentation.

Declarative business artifact centric modeling of decision and knowledge intensive business processes

In this paper we address the problem of modeling collaborative decision and knowledge intensive business processes (sometimes referred to as Decision Intensive Processes, or DIP processes). DIP processes assist users in performing decision intensive tasks, and provide users with a guidance relevant to process execution context. DIP processes are by nature collaborative, data-driven, need to support various kinds of flexibility at design and run time, and need to integrate with external services and information sources. Such a combination presents significant challenges for contemporary business processes technologies. We present a solution based on a business artifacts paradigm (a.k.a. business entities with lifecycles) using a Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) model for declarative lifecycles specification. We introduce a CoreControl -- MicroProcess process design pattern, which allows a natural blending of a business functional process structure (usual for most business processes), with a decision & knowledge driven structure providing domain specific decision guidance to users. The proposed design pattern along with the declarative GSM BA approach provide suitable design primitives for DIP process, as demonstrated on a real problem from the supply chain solutions enablement domain.

Towards a Plug-and-Play B2B Marketing Tool Based on Time-Sensitive Information Extraction

The LARIAT system developed at IBM Research uses information extraction applied to news feeds and other time-sensitive documents, along with historical and enterprise data, to provide a stream for B2B sales leads to different sales teams. This paper overviews the system and discusses lessons learned. LARIAT is contrasted with the IBM infoSage system from almost two decades ago. The experience with LARIAT is used as the basis for the design of a Solution-as-a-Service framework that will enable a richly extensible version of the capability, which could serve multiple B2B companies while affording economies of scale.

IBM system G Social Media Solution: Analyze multimedia content, people, and network dynamics in context

We present IBM System G Social Media Solution, which includes a suite of applications designed for in-context monitoring, exploration, and analysis of social multimedia content as well as related people and network dynamics. Each individual application focuses on a unique aspect of social media data analysis in relevant context; collectively, they provide a comprehensive set of tools for exploring and analyzing real-time and historical social media data at large scale. The solution is empowered by a unified data management platform, based on a property graph model, to efficiently handle a large variety of social media applications.