Rami-Habib Eid-Sabbagh

Detection of naming convention violations in process models for different languages

Companies increasingly use business process modeling for documenting and redesigning their operations. However, due to the size of such modeling initiatives, they often struggle with the quality assurance of their model collections. While many model properties can already be checked automatically, there is a notable gap of techniques for checking linguistic aspects such as naming conventions of process model elements. In this paper, we address this problem by introducing an automatic technique for detecting violations of naming conventions. This technique is based on text corpora and independent of linguistic resources such as WordNet. Therefore, it can be easily adapted to the broad set of languages for which corpora exist. We demonstrate the applicability of the technique by analyzing nine process model collections from practice, including over 27,000 labels and covering three different languages. The results of the evaluation show that our technique yields stable results and can reliably deal with ambiguous cases. In this way, this paper provides an important contribution to the field of automated quality assurance of conceptual models. We present an automatic technique for detecting violations of naming conventions.The technique is based on text corpora and independent of linguistic resources.Because of its design, the approach can be easily adapted to other languages.The evaluation includes 27,000 labels and three different languages.

Business process architecture: use and correctness

Becoming more and more process oriented, companies develop collections of hundreds or even thousands of business process models that represent the complex system of cooperating entities that form an organization. Designing and analyzing the structure of this system of business process models emerges as a new challenge, which is covered by the field of business process architecture. This paper presents a formal conceptual framework for representing and analyzing business process architectures. It identifies patterns of relations between process models, and it introduces anti-patterns that represent erroneous relations between them. The conceptual framework and the patterns are evaluated using a real-world process model collection. The evaluation shows that explicitly representing and analyzing relations between process models can help improving the correctness and consistency of the business process architecture as a whole.

A Platform for Research on Process Model Collections

Business process management has received considerable attention and many companies achieved a high maturity level and hence, generated collections of process models that form a knowledge asset essential to their operations. These collections bear opportunities for innovation: Empirical research establishes methods and techniques to support and improve business process management; yet, these need to be validated with regards to process models from industry. However, due to their heterogeneity, extracting and analyzing process models from process model collections is a tedious task and time consuming.

Business process architectures with multiplicities: transformation and correctness

Business processes are instrumental to manage work in organisations. To study the interdependencies between business processes, Business Process Architectures (BPA) have been introduced. These express trigger and message flow relations between business processes. When we investigate real world business process architectures we find complex interdependencies, involving multiple process instances. These aspects have not been studied in detail so far, especially concerning correctness properties. In this paper, we propose a modular transformation of BPAs to open nets for the analysis of behavior involving multiple business processes instances with multi-communication.

Deriving Business Process Data Architecturesfrom Process Model Collections

The focus in BPM shifts from single processes to process interactions. Business process architectures were established as convenient way to model and analyze such interactions on an abstract level focusing on message and trigger relations. Shared data objects are often a means of interrelating processes. In this paper, we extract hidden data dependencies between processes from process models with data annotations and their object life cycles. This information is used to construct a business process architecture, thus enabling analysis with existing methods. We describe and validate our approach on an extract from a case study that demonstrates its applicability to real world use cases.

A Tool for Business Process Architecture Analysis

Business Process Architectures BPA are used for structuring and managing process collections. For optimising business processes a high level view on their interdependencies is necessary. BPAs allow to capture message and trigger flow relations between processes and their multiple process instances within a process collection. However, tools that allow analysis of BPAs besides visualization do not exist. This contribution presents a novel tool to model and to analyse the correctness of a BPA by transforming it into open nets, translate the correctness criteria into CTL formula and model check those using LoLA.

Automatic Business Process Model Translation with BPMT

Nowadays, many enterprises use business process models for documenting and supporting their operations. As many enterprises have branches in several countries and provide similar services throughout the globe, there is high potential for re-using these process models. However, the language barrier is a major obstacle for the successful re-use of process models, especially in multi-national companies. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting the Business Process Model Translator (BPMT), a technique for the automated translation of business process models that eases the re-use of business process models and reduces redundant work in multi-national companies. It builds upon the state-of-the-art machine translation system Moses and extends it with word and translation disambiguation considering the context of the domain. As a result, the BPMT can successfully deal with the compact and special language fragments that are typically found in business process models. A two-fold evaluation with the BLEU metric and an expert survey showed improvements of our approach over Moses.

Analyzing business process architectures

In recent years, Business Process Management has gained maturity in private and public organizations. Organization own large process collections. Organizing, analyzing, and managing them becomes more complex. In the course of this development, research on Business Process Architectures has gotten more attention over the last decade. A Business Process Architecture describes the relationships between business processes within a process collections as well as the guidelines to organize them. However, formalization and verification techniques are still missing in this context. To overcome this gap we propose a novel Petri net based Business Process Architecture formalization. Based on this, we can resort to known Petri net verification techniques for the analysis of Business Process Architectures patterns and anti-patterns in regard to their structural and behavioral properties. Our methodology is evaluated on a real use case from the public administration.

From Process Models to Business Process Architectures: Connecting the Layers

Business process management has become a standard commodity to manage and improve business operations in organisations. Large process model collections emerged. Managing, and maintaining them has become a major area of research. Business process architectures (BPAs) have been introduced to support this task focusing on interdependencies between processes. Both the process and BPA layer are often modeled independently, creating inconsistencies between both layers. However, a consistent overview on process interdependencies on BPA level is of high importance, especially in regard to assessing the impact of change when optimising business process collaborations. In this paper, we propose a formal approach to extract BPAs from process model collections connecting process layer and BPA layer for assuring consistency between them. Interdependencies between process models will be reflected in trigger and message flows on BPA level giving a high level overview of process collaboration as well as allowing its formal verification with existing approaches. We will show the extraction of BPAs from process model collections on a running example modeled in BPMN.