Riccardo Cognini

Research challenges in business process adaptability

Modern software systems are more and more deployed within moving and continuously changing contexts. It is not easy to consider all the possible contexts configurations/variances at priori, or it is quite cumbersome and error prone to list and program all this variability points at development time. For such a reason different research trends try to develop mechanisms to express, analyse and support the dynamic adaptation of a software system while it is running. Business Processes show today similar characteristics. In order to keep their competitiveness and quality for products and services, organizations need to be able to adapt to changing contexts. Changes have to be reflected in the software systems supporting the corresponding organizational activities. In this paper we report the results of a systematic literature review on Business Process Adaptation. The reviewing process lead us to consider 84 papers from the main digital libraries indexing computer science conferences and journals. From the reading and the systematic analysis of these papers we derived some research trends and challenges which have been considered relevant to be able to cover the main sources of adaptation in the definition of effective Business Processes.

Business process flexibility - a systematic literature review with a software systems perspective

Business Process flexibility supports organizations in changing their everyday work activities to remain competitive. Since much research has been done on this topic a better awareness on the current state of knowledge is needed. This paper reports the results of a systematic literature review to develop a map on Business Process flexibility with a special focus on software systems related aspects. It covers a spectrum of the state of the art from academic point of view. It includes 164 research works from the main computer science digital libraries. After an introduction into the topic the applied methodology is described. The output of the paper is in the form of schemes and reflections. Starting from the needs for Business Process flexibility, its impact on Business Process life-cycle is introduced. Successively instruments used to express and to support Business Process flexibility are presented together with related validation scenarios. In this paper we also highlight possible future research lines needing further investigations. In particular we identified room for future works in the area of languages for modeling flexibility, on-the-fly verification solutions, adaptation of Business Process running instances, and techniques for evolution recognition.

Extending Feature Models to Express Variability in Business Process Models

In complex organizations Business Processes tends to exist in different variants that typically share objectives and part of their structure. In recent years it has been recognized that the explicit modeling of variability can brings important benefits to organizations that can more easily reflect on their behavior and more efficiently structure their activities and processes. Particularly interesting in this respect is the situation of the Public Administration that delivers the same service using many different and replicated processes. The management of such complexity ask for methods explicitly supporting the modeling of variability aspects for Business Processes. In this paper we present a novel notation to describe variability of Business Processes and an approach to successively derive process variants. The notation takes inspiration from feature modeling approaches and has been implemented in a real tool using the ADOxx platform. The notation, and the corresponding approach, seems particularly suitable for the Public Administration context, and it has been actually experimented in a complex real scenario.

Using Data-Object Flow Relations to Derive Control Flow Variants in Configurable Business Processes

Focusing on the relationship between behavioural and information perspectives in this paper we present an approach to support flexibility of Business Processes. The approach extends Feature Model descriptions with data-objects in order to derive process fragments and process variants. The approach has been applied to a data-intensive scenario such as the reporting activity of EU projects with encouraging results.

A Case Modelling Language for Process Variant Management in Case-Based Reasoning

Conventional business process management has been very successful for routine work but has deficiencies in dealing with the flexibility of knowledge workers’ work, since the tasks are hard to determine and highly dependent on the current situation. For knowledge workers it is useful to structure the processes just in part as process variants, which can be adapted, modified and even newly created at runtime by them. This paper describes an application of a case-based reasoning approach and introduces a process variant modelling language that supports the manual generation and refinement of generalized process variants. This approach is demonstrated in a public administration scenario.

HawkEye : a tool for collaborative business process modelling and verification

In this paper we propose a collaborative Business Process modeling approach where multiple stakeholders can be coordinate considering global and local views on Business Processes. In the modeling phase we use a standard language such as BPMN 2.0 that provides both local view, via collaboration specification, and global view, via choreography models specification. The approach provides support also for analysis activities aiming at reconciling local and global views to effectively and efficiently derive inter-organizational Business Processes. For the analysis phase we adapted well known verification approaches in order to check behavioral constraints.

Business Process Feature Model: An Approach to Deal with Variability of Business Processes

In order to help organizations in providing similar services without the need to structure each of them separately, this chapter presents a modeling notation that supports variability for Business Process modeling. Variability is particularly relevant for Public Administration institutions where different offices organize the provisioning of services to citizens following similar rules, and adapting them to the characteristics of the different offices. The notation and the approach are inspired to feature modeling techniques, whereas in this case features are used to represent activities of a process family that can be differently implemented and connected. The proposed approach facilitates the development of a partially specified process model in terms of a set of fragments that in a subsequent step can be connected in order to fully specify the desired control flow. The notation and the approach were implemented on the the ADOxx platform.

Process Variability Modeling for Complex Organizations

When organizations provide similar services and share the same mission they often behave similarly. This, in particular, is true in the context of Public Administration where different offices organize the provisioning of services to citizens in similar ways. This paper presents a novel notation and approach to support variability modeling for those scenarios in which it is difficult to fully foresee in advance how variability can affect the various process perspectives. Notation and approach are inspired on feature modeling where features are used to represents activities of a processes family that can be differently implemented. Applying the proposed approach it is possible to derive a kind of partially predefined process model variant, which is a set of fragments, that in a subsequent step needs to be augmented with additional elements to then fully define process behavior. Notation and approach has been validated on real case studies with encouraging results.

EGOV: A solution for public services execution

Public Administration (PA) sector in modern society is characterized by the need to support extremely complex processes in order to provide services to citizens and business. Complexity is raised by the fact that the provisioning of services is, in the most cases, a collaborative activity shared among different, possibly many, PA offices. It is also true that in the modern PAs, transparency is one of the most important requirement to improve, on the one hand, administration efficiency and, on the other hand, citizens satisfaction. In this scenario the paper presents an approach and an IT tool supporting PAs collaboration and transparency named Scrivania. It allows Public Administration employee to model, publish their services and be guided by Business Processes models. Many PAs can collaborate in the modeling phase of services using the collaborative editor provided by Scrivania. Services are modeled using BPMN 2.0 OMG standard language for BP modeling. Instead, from the point of view of citizens, using Scrivania, they can search and execute the provided services, tracing their execution and, in case of delay, observe the state it occurs.

Modelling Process Intensive Scenarios for the Smart City

Smart city can be considered as a process-intensive environment that needs to be as flexible as possible to support a continuously evolving scenario. In this paper we present an approach to support flexibility of Business Processes regulating the behaviour of ICT systems deployed within a smart city. The approach permits to deal with large collections of process variants thanks to the integration of Business Process notations and Feature Model descriptions. The approach is applied to a smart mobility scenario with a specific focus on bike sharing systems.