Rajaa Saidi

The Use of Ubiquitous Computing for Business Process Improvement

Due to the cut throat competition among organizations, business process improvement is now an everyday activity. A relentless activity that makes business processes more complex than ever. As they get more complex, the improvement rounds become time-consuming, costly and the quality of each outcome is put into jeopardy, which is somehow paradoxical with the concept of improvement. In this paper, we propose a business process improvement technique based on ubiquitous computing. First, we couple business processes with ubiquitous computing and define a ubiquitous business process. Then, we explain how ubiquitous computing positively impacts the performance metrics of business processes. Afterwards, we set a specification for designing ubiquitous business processes by extending BPMN. Finally, we propose a concrete case study about time-banking to corroborate our theory. A comparative study of the same process, in ubiquitous and non-ubiquitous versions, is established. The results clearly illustrate that ubiquitous computing impacts positively the business process performance metrics. Still, the case study corroborates that ubiquitous computing not only improves a business process but also enables it to get improved with the least of human interventions.

Introducing decision-aware business processes

HighlightsEstablishing a comparative study about existing X-Aware business processes in the literature.Defining Decision-Aware Business Process and Decision Partition.Setting the specification of the Decision Partition Design Patterns.Proposing a broad range of independent/reusable decision partition design patterns to fulfill distinct business requirements and be used in different business situations. Business processes are designed to smoothly operate under multiple contexts (or business situations). Each context technically implies taking a different course of action. Be that as it may, going for the most appropriate action is still left up to the business process participant without any kind of assistance. Such a situation demonstrates that there is a lack of a context-aware decision-making feature. This paper addresses the issue of enabling a context-aware decision-making within the frame of business processes. We combine the concepts of business process, context-awareness and decision-making to introduce a new concept of Decision-Aware Business Processes in which decision partitions are the cornerstones. A decision partition reacts to the collected contextual parameters by selecting or recommending the most appropriate decision(s). In fact, the focus of this research is to introduce a new formalism for designing these partitions by means of patterns. Throughout our approach, each proposed pattern leads to building decision partitions in a straight-forward fashion. An overall example is proposed to illustrate our approach. It is inspired from the banking industry and introduces a decision-aware business process that handles loan applications. To sum up, whether seasoned, novice or in-between, business process participants will be able to save time in taking action(s). Moreover, the workflow becomes no longer stagnant across the business process. Instead, it dynamically adapts itself to each new set of business requirements imposed by the collected contextual input(s).

Variability patterns for business processes in BPMN

AbstractMany entities, both in academia and the business sector, urge an efficient improvement of business processes. However, when it comes to addressing this point, each slight disparity in the business rules and/or objectives translates into a separate model, which is neither practical nor acceptable as it burdens the host process-aware information system with repetitive and almost verbatim instances. To solve this issue, we propose considering variability. Variability will serve as a business process improvement technique to efficiently design and run a variable business process throughout different business situations that are similar to one another is some ways yet differ in others. First, we define variability within the context of business processes. Second, we present a set of variability patterns and explain how they are used. We validate our approach via the business process improvement patterns known and used by the community. The variability design patterns are a series of business process improvement patterns for building business process with variability and efficiently acting on the improved process performance metrics.

A Conceptual Architecture for a Cloud-Based Context-Aware Service Composition

In today’s ubiquitous environments, more and more companies use cloud computing services to achieve their everyday operations and processes. However, the development of these services is a tedious and time consuming task. Moreover, existing solutions rarely take into account the personalization and the adaptation of services to the context of their use. In this paper, we propose an architecture for context-aware service composition in cloud environments to address the challenges mentioned above. The architecture takes advantage of service composition as a way to create new composite services from a set of atomic or composite ones, causing the reduction of development efforts and time to market, and also, the introduction of context-awareness to manage the dynamics of ubiquitous environments.

Context Modeling and Metamodeling: A State of the Art

Due to advances in sensor technology, sensors are becoming more powerful, cheaper and smaller. This evolution generates big amounts of data, which may have no value unless we have the ability of analyzing, interpreting and understanding it. Context-awareness computing (collection, modeling, metamodeling, reasoning and distribution of context) plays a significant role in this challenge. This paper tries to contribute by analyzing, comparing and consolidating works in this sense especially in context modeling and metamodeling.

Business models alignment with reuse approach

This article addresses the design of Information System (IS) within a vision including business process and business service concepts. Indeed, the concept of business service has quickly become more important in the context of information systems engineering. It is proposed as a new paradigm that promotes the reuse of conceptual units in order to improve the flexibility and efficiency of the business processes of the company. To do this, we propose a model of business service that encapsulate an elementary business unit accompanied by an assembly approach to allow the reuse of the business service for the design of business processes.

Toward a Smart Tourism Recommender System: Applied to Tangier City

Context-awareness has captivated a lot of attention, especially in the field of mobile and pervasive computing. Indeed, an important demand for real-world location data within the virtual world is growing. Yet, user’s context is more than its location. Most information systems do not take into account the diversity of users’ need and preferences because of its complexity to manage. Context-Aware Systems (CAS) are self-adaptive. Thus, automating the development of such systems and the interpretation of user’s preferences is a real challenge. One way to achieve this challenge is by discovering knowledge for prediction regarding actions of users with the systems (their history and so on). In this article, we explore how context information can be exploit to create intelligent and adaptive recommender systems. It provides an overview of the multiform notion of context with a discussion of several context oriented approaches and systems, and illustrates the usage of such approaches in several application areas. In this paper, we present our vision of the notion of context through a context metamodel. We also present an effective tourist recommendation system that respect personal preferences and capture usage, personal, social and environmental contextual parameters. A case study applied has been conducted to Tangier, a Moroccan city where a new intelligent international city will be constructed for the next decade. The article concludes by discussing the challenges and future research directions for context-aware recommender systems.

C2IoT: A framework for Cloud-based Context-aware Internet of Things services for smart cities

Abstract The smart city vision was born by the integration of ICT in the day to day city management operations and citizens lives, owing to the need for novel and smart ways to manage the cities resources; making them more efficient, sustainable and transparent. However, the understanding of the crucial elements to this integration and how they can benefit from each other proves difficult and unclear. In this article, we investigate the intricate synergies between different technologies and paradigms involved in the smart city vision, to help design a robust framework, capable of handling the challenges impeding its successful implementation. To this end, we propose a context-aware centered approach to present a holistic view of a smart city as viewed from the different angles (Cloud, IoT, Big Data). We also propose a framework encompassing elements from the different enablers, leveraging their strengths to build and develop smart-x applications and services.

Event-driven modeling for context-aware information systems

In mobile computing developers will need to develop applications that will interact with the end user. Context-aware applications notify or ask users what they want based on what they have sensed or on a user profile. Event-driven mobile computing detects conditions of interest to users and notifies them accordingly. In this paper we discuss the importance and challenges in designing event-driven applications through a comparison between some event-driven metamodels and propose an event metamodel to instantiate productive and comprehensible models.

Évaluations qualitatives d'un mécanisme d'identification de fragments métiers réutilisables à partir de processus métiers.

The Information Systems (IS) must be flexible enough to provide a suitable solution to any dynamic change. Thus, the reuse approach has become widely adopted and used to support this flexibility. In our work, we are particularly interested in reusing business processes fragments. This paper describes an approach for decomposing business processes, named DecoPM, and put in value the need for validation via qualitative evaluations. Experiments on a focus group were conducted and the results are presented here. On the basis of these experiments, the decomposition process improvements have been added. The improvement of this method includes a phase of BPMN models restructuring and a mechanism for fonnulating business objectives.