Saoussen Cheikhrouhou

Toward a Time-centric modeling of Business Processes in BPMN 2.0

Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce market is expected to expand rapidly in coming years. In this context, organizations tend to rely more on business process management (BPM) to streamline their operations. The business process field is influenced by a wide range of temporal constraints which rise from legal, regulatory, and managerial rules. One of the most promising standards for business process modeling, namely the Business process Model and notation BPMN poorly addresses the time dimension so far. In this paper, we elaborate an extension to BPMN 2.0 to handle the time dimension. The aim of this BPMN extensions is to support business analysts and modellers in easily including the needed temporal constraints in their processes. We motivate and justify our proposed extensions by means of illustrative case studies. Furthermore, based on the proposed extensions, a verification approach based on the model checking technique is used to diagnose potential temporal violations of the process model. The work presented in this paper sets foundation for later automation of these constraints through process execution engines.

The temporal perspective in business process modeling: a survey and research challenges

One key perspective when dealing with business process management is time. All business experts agree upon the fact that time is a key resource for processes within organisations. Indeed, time managing is an effective cost reduction strategy and thus ensures profit maximization for organisations. As a result, business managers, researchers, and academicians in management are striving to have full-support of temporal aspects in current business process management suites. Consequently, modeling and managing temporal requirements in the business process field is becoming a topic of intensive research. This paper presents a survey of the existing approaches to specifying and verifying the temporal perspective in business processes. Furthermore, this paper provides a critical and comparative analysis of the studied approaches and stands out major challenges to be addressed to substantially enhance the time management in the business process management field.

Enhancing Formal Specification and Verification of Temporal Constraints in Business Processes

Formal specification and verification support of time-related constraints constitute fundamental challenges for any Business Process Management (BPM) system. Reluctantly, the literature on the subject of formal specification and verification of advanced temporal constraints such as absolute temporal constraints associated with relative temporal constraints is scarce. In this paper, we propose a novel approach enabling the formal specification and verification of advanced temporal constraints of business processes. The particularity of our approach is that it caters for relative and absolute related temporal constraints while relying on the dependencies that can exist between theses constraints. In fact, it is important to deal with such dependencies to handle the violations that can arise as soon as possible at design step. To do so, we propose a formal approach which relies on the timed automata formalism. In this context, we propose a set of mapping rules and algorithms where the semantic of timed automata is preserved even if we deal with absolute and relative temporal constraints. Using the defined formal model, we investigate a model checking based verification process that aims at validating business processes against their absolute and relative temporal constraints.

Toward a Verification of Time-Centric Business Process Models

Temporal constraints are one cornerstone of process specification and verification in the whole process lifecycle. Nevertheless, in the existing research approaches, little consideration has been given to the subject of verification of advanced temporal constraints such as absolute temporal constraints associated with relative temporal constraints. In this paper, we handle the problem of verification while considering advanced relative and absolute temporal constraints. Firstly, a set of rules are proposed to prevent the designer to specify some faulty temporal combinations of absolute temporal constraints, early on, before the execution step. Second, to capture relative temporal constraints, we propose a mapping step whose aim is to map timed business processes into timed automata. Using the defined formal model, we finally investigate a model checking based verification approach that aims at validating business processes against their temporal constraints.

On Enabling Time-aware Consistency of Collaborative Cross-Organisational Business Processes

Collaborative Inter-Organisational Business Processes (IOBPs) are a major step in automating and supporting collaborations of organisations. In this context, collaborative IOBP are usually constrained by hard timing requirements. This paper proposes an approach for analyzing temporal consistency of collaborative IOBPs. The aim is to verify temporal consistency of IOBP and to provide the enactment service with largest intervals as starting time windows of the processes. The proposed approach enables organisations to detect, early on, temporal inconsistencies that may constitute obstacles towards their interaction. Indeed, it provides an enactment service, which provides each partner with information about temporal restrictions to respect by its own processes in accordance with the overall temporal constraints of all involved processes.

Time-Aware Automatic Process View Generation

Nowadays, the OMG standard business process model and notation BPMN is gaining widespread use in the business world. In this context, several underlying issues must be considered. In this paper, we are particularly interested in the problem of getting control over the business process outsourcing through views generation. Indeed, the concept of views is essential since it allows organizations to choose the parts that can be exposed and to keep secret the critical parts of their business processes. In this context, we are specially interested in considering temporal properties when building public views from private processes. First, we propose a BPMN extension for capturing temporal requirements during the business process modelling (BPM) phase. Second, based on this extension, our work preserves privacy in inter-organizational business processes (IOBPs) by a Time-aware Automatic Process View Generation TAPVG approach. Finally, a verification approach based on the model checking technique is used to diagnose potential temporal violations of the process model.

Formal Specification and Verification of Cloud Resource Allocation Using Timed Petri-Nets

Context: Known for its resource elasticity and pay-per-use model, more and more organizations are adopting cloud computing to support the execution of their business processes. To support organizations meet their financial restrictions, cloud providers offer different time-based pricing strategies.

A comprehensive survey on modeling of cyber-physical systems: Survey on modeling CPS

Modeling Cyber‐physical systems (CPS) is a challenging step that requires a lot of background from both the cyber and physical fields. However, there is a lack of studies in the existing literature that discuss the state of the art in modeling CPS or explore the research gaps in this area. In this paper, we survey existing approaches to modeling CPS. We focus on studying the considered CPS properties. Based on this study, we classify these properties and discuss their importance in different application domains. Moreover, research directions are presented to address key challenges in the specification of CPS models.