Sami Bhiri

Modelling Capabilities as Attribute-Featured Entities

The concept of capability is a fundamental element not only for Service Oriented Architecture but also for Enterprise Information Systems. This concepts denotes what an action (i.e., a service, a program, a business process, etc.) can do from a functional perspective. Despite its importance, current approaches do not model it properly: either they confuse it with an annotated invocation interface or do not go beyond the classical IOPE paradigm which, from an end user perspective, does not have an intuitive description of what is the capability being modeled. In this paper, we present a conceptual model as an RDF-schema for describing capabilities as attribute-featured entities which is more user friendly. Actually, we consider a capability as an action verb and a set of domain specific attributes that relates to an exact business meaning. This way, we are able to represent capabilities at several levels of abstraction from the most abstract one with just an action verb to the most concrete one that corresponds to the exact need of an end user which is not possible with current capability modelling approaches. We are also able to interlink capabilities for creating a hierarchical structure that allows for improving the discovery process. Our meta model is based on RDF and makes use of Linked Data to define capability attributes as well as their values.

An Indexing Structure for Maintaining Configurable Process Models

During the business process modeling phase, different environments and languages have been proposed. All of them are trying to narrow the communication gap between both business and IT users or making modeling task as optimal as possible. From these perspectives, we prioritize assisting business users to express in an efficient and easy way their requirements (i.e., defining their business process models). In this context, reusing existing process models is well supported and preferred rather than modeling from scratch. Configurable business process models aim at merging different process variants into a single configurable model. In this paper, we define an indexing structure to represent configurable process models. We give a set of structuring principles and we show how to maintain this structure when adding a new variant. We adopt a hierarchical representation of business goals variations. The contribution of our structure is that it allows for modularity handling.

Merging Business Process Variants

We propose in this paper a merging algorithm for integrating a set of process variants into a single configurable process model. This integrated process model should (i) subsume the behaviours of all original models, (ii) ensure a trace back of the origin of each element and (iii) derive any of the input models by means of configuration and individualization. Existing solutions either fail in respecting all these requirements or allow for merging only pairs of process models. However, our algorithm allows for merging a set of process models at once.

Configurable Process Models for Logistics Case Study for Customs Clearance Processes

Configuration based modelling is one of the reuse oriented modelling techniques that allows for exploiting proven best practices in business processes management. This paper is a case study of the use of configurable process models in logistics. It analysis and creates a set of process models for customs clearance services for import and export processes and delivers the configurable process model out of these models. The paper discusses main challenges for the use of configurable process models in such domain and draws some future work.

Business Process Model Discovery Using Semantics

Business process model discovery represents a pillar technique that enables business process model reuse. In this paper we describe a method for business process model discovery, which uses semantically annotated business processes. We created an RDF vocabulary for business processes that captures functional, non functional and structural properties that is used in the annotations of basic activities. We developed a set of algorithms to automatically generate different representations of the same business process at different granularity levels. We defined a set of rules to extract the RDF meta data in the annotated business process models and to build an RDF knowledge base which then can be interrogated using SPARQL.

Business Process Model Overview: Determining the Capability of a Process Model Using Ontologies

Representing business process models to stakeholders depends on the required level of details. While technical team is interested in HOW processes are performed and their detailed representation, strategic management team is more concerned by WHAT processes perform by featuring business properties. In order to allow for a seamless navigation between the WHAT and the HOW levels of process representations, we propose in this paper an algorithm that takes as input a detailed process model and provides a quick overview of its capability. Our solution imposes that the elements of the input model are annotated with their capabilities. In this paper we reuse a previous work on capability modeling.

Service Offer Descriptions and Expressive Search Requests – Key Enablers of Late Service Binding

Late service binding is a long-term goal for Service Computing. It fully enables service loose coupling by allowing service consumers to dynamically identify services at runtime. We present models of expressive search requests and service descriptions enabling matchmaking of highly configurable services whose properties are request-dependent and dynamic. Both models are grounded in lightweight semantic formalisms of RDF and SPARQL, and use Linked Data. Our hierarchical service model provides a foundation for runtime generation of service offer descriptions, while the majority of service models and service matchmaking approaches do not sufficiently address service dynamicity aspects and operate on static service descriptions. We apply our approach to a shipping domain in order to show its feasibility for solving real world problems and its benefits for the late service binding.

Reuse-Oriented Business Process Modelling Based on a Hierarchical Structure

Managing variability in business processes has attracted a lot of research interest. Some of the current works try to manage variability at runtime and others at design time. We are interested in the latter where it consists of managing different process variants in order to enable their reuse. Even though there exist different proposals dealing with variability at design time most of them suffer from the major shortcoming of decision support in choosing the suitable alternatives. In this context, we propose a framework that allows for reusing business process models by means of a hierarchical structure. In this paper, we present our ongoing research in defining this framework: its data structure as well as first thoughts about maintaining it.

Better Behavioral Description for Dynamic Semantic Web Services Collaboration

Semantic Web services aim at enabling automatic service operations in order to keep human intervention to a minimum, enable seamless interaction between the services, reduce the risk of operation errors, and maximize the efficiency of the interactions. Current semantic Web services are functionally well-described, but behaviorally poorly-described especially for complex Web services. This defect may cause behavioral mismatches although the provider and the requester are functionally compatible. This paper presents a Web service behavioral description model with public and private processes, illuminates the importance of public process for complex Web service interactions, and proposes an approach to improve Web service behavioral description based on current proposed semantic Web services conceptual models.

Capability Modelling – Case of Logistics Capabilities

Even though the concept of capability is an important element in service oriented architectures and enterprise information systems, little effort has been put towards modelling it as a first class citizen. Major related contributions were part of other efforts such as modelling business processes, service description and search requests. Current approaches either confuse capabilities with invocation interfaces, do not go beyond the classical IOPEs paradigm, or classify them into categories. Most of these approaches do not allow to determine intuitively what the exact capability is as well as they do not describe it with proper business features. In our work, we are interested in modelling and managing capabilities as stand alone entities, presented via an action verb and a set of domain related attributes/features. Presenting capabilities as such allows us to represent them at different levels of abstraction and make explicit links between them. In this paper, we highlight the benefits of our model and we build on top of it a set of requirements that allow end users to generate more custom capabilities. In order to illustrate our conceptual model benefits, we apply it in describing logistics capabilities.