Sira Yongchareon

A process view framework for artifact-centric business processes

Over the past several years, the artifact-centric approach to workflow has emerged as a new paradigm of business process modelling. It provides a robust structure of workflow and supports the flexibility of workflow enactment and evolution especially in a collaborative environment. To facilitate and foster business collaborations, the customisation, privacy protection, and authority control of business processes are essential. Given the diverse requirements of different roles involved in business processes, providing various views with adequate process information is critical to effective business process management. Several approaches have been proposed to construct views for traditional process-centric business processes; however, no approach has been developed for artifact-centric processes. The declarative manner of process modelling in artifact-centric approaches makes view construction challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel process view framework for artifact-centric business processes. The framework consists of artifact-centric process models, view models, and a mechanism to derive views from underlying process models. Consistency rules are also defined to preserve the consistency between a constructed view and its base process model.

An artifact-centric view-based approach to modeling inter-organizational business processes

Over past several years, there have been increasing needs for more efficient approaches to the design and implementation of inter-organizational business processes. The process collaboration spanning organizational boundaries is deemed to keep the organization autonomy, which means each organization owns its freedom of modifying internal operations to meet their private goals while satisfying the mutual objective with its partners. To achieve these, we propose an artifact-centric view-based framework for interorganizational process modeling consisting of an artifact-centric collaboration model, and a conformance mechanism between public view and private view to support the participating organizations customization and changes of their internal operations while ensuring the correctness of collaboration process.

A framework for realizing artifact-centric business processes in service-oriented architecture

Over the past few years, the artifact-centric approach to workflow modeling has been beneficially evidenced for both academic and industrial researches. This approach not only provides a rich insight to key business data and their evolution through business processes, but also allows business and IT stakeholders to have a single unified view of the processes. There are several studies on the modeling and its theoretical aspects; however, the possible realization of this approach in a particular technology is still in its fancy stage. Recently, there exist proposals to achieve such realization by converting from artifact-centric model to activity-centric model that can be implemented on existing workflow management systems. We argue that this approach has several drawbacks as the transformation, which is unidirectional, poses loss of information. In this paper, we propose a framework for the realization of artifact-centric business processes in service-oriented architecture achieving a fully automated mechanism that can realize the artifact-centric model without performing model transformation. A comprehensive discussion and comparison of our framework and other existing works are also presented.

A view framework for modeling and change validation of artifact-centric inter-organizational business processes

Over the past several years, more efficient approaches have been on increasing demands for designing, modeling, and implementing inter-organizational business processes. In the process collaboration across organizational boundaries, organizations still stay autonomic, which means each organization can freely modify its internal operations to meet its private goals while satisfying the mutual objectives with its partners. Recently, artifact-centric process modeling has been evidenced with higher flexibility in process modeling and execution than traditional activity-centric modeling methods. Although some efforts have been put to exploring how artifact-centric modeling facilitates the collaboration between organizations, the achievement is still far from satisfaction level, particularly in aspects of process modeling and validating. To fill in the gaps, we propose a view framework for modeling and validating the changes of inter-organizational business processes. The framework consists of an artifact-centric process meta-model, public view constructing mechanism, and private view and change validating mechanisms, which are specially designed to facilitate the participating organizations to customize their internal operations while ensuring the correctness of the collaborating processes. We also implement a software tool named Artifact-M to help organizations to automatically construct a minimal and consistent public view from their processes. A process view framework to allow organizations autonomously participate in the collaboration.Each party has freedom to change its local processes while ensuring successful collaboration.An algorithm for constructing a consistent, minimal public view based on the local processes.A verification mechanism that allows organizations to consistently change their local processes.

WS-BPEL Business Process Abstraction and Concretisation

Business process management is tightly coupled with service-oriented architecture, as business processes orchestrate services for business collaboration at logical level. Given the complexity of business processes and the variety of users, it is a sought-after feature to show a business process with different views, so as to cater for the diverse interests, authority levels, etc., of users. This paper presents a framework named FlexView to support process abstraction and concretisation. A novel model is proposed to characterise the structural components of a business process and describe the relations between these components. Two algorithms are developed to formally illustrate the realisation of process abstraction and concretisation in compliance with the defined consistency rules. A prototype is also implemented with WS-BPEL to prove the applicability of the approach.

Efficient Process Model Discovery Using Maximal Pattern Mining

In recent years, process mining has become one of the most important and promising areas of research in the field of business process management as it helps businesses understand, analyze, and improve their business processes. In particular, several proposed techniques and algorithms have been proposed to discover and construct process models from workflow execution logs i.e., event logs. With the existing techniques, mined models can be built based on analyzing the relationship between any two events seen in event logs. Being restricted by that, they can only handle special cases of routing constructs and often produce unsound models that do not cover all of the traces seen in the log. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for process discovery using Maximal Pattern Mining MPM where we construct patterns based on the whole sequence of events seen on the traces--ensuring the soundness of the mined models. Our MPM technique can handle loops of any length, duplicate tasks, non-free choice constructs, and long distance dependencies. Our evaluation shows that it consistently achieves better precision, replay fitness and efficiency than the existing techniques.

A Survey on Approaches to Modeling Artifact-Centric Business Processes

Business Process Modeling using artifact-centric approach has gained increasing interest over the past few years. The ability to put data and process aspects on an equal footing has made it a powerful tool for efficient business process modeling. The artifact-centric approach is based on key business-relevant entities called business artifacts, which are central for guiding business operations as they navigate through the business operations. The artifact-centric modeling approach can be laid in a four dimensional framework called BALSA for defining business processes, where the four dimensions include business artifacts, lifecycles, services and associations. Based on this data-centric paradigm, several artifact-centric meta-models have been emerged in the recent years. Although all the proposed models claim to support the artifact-centric approach, their support in specifying the BALSA elements of artifacts was not clearly described in the existing literature. This paper reviews all existing approaches to artifact-centric modeling and also discuss to what extent they align with the BALSA framework.

Role-Based Process View Derivation and Composition

The process view concept deploys a partial and temporal representation to adjust the visible view of a business process according to various perception constraints of users. Process view technology is of practical use for privacy protection and authorization control in process-oriented business management. Owing to complex organizational structure, it is challenging for large companies to accurately specify the diverse perception of different users over business processes. Aiming to tackle this issue, this article presents a role-based process view model to incorporate role dependencies into process view derivation. Compared to existing process view approaches, ours particularly supports runtime updates to the process view perceivable to a user with specific view merging operations, thereby enabling the dynamic tracing of process perception. A series of rules and theorems are established to guarantee the structural consistency and validity of process view transformation. A hypothetical case is conducted to illustrate the feasibility of our approach, and a prototype is developed for the proof-of-concept purpose.

Resource Management for Business Process Scheduling in the Presence of Availability Constraints

In the context of business process management, the resources required by business processes, such as workshop staff, manufacturing machines, etc., tend to follow certain availability patterns, due to maintenance cycles, work shifts and other factors. Such availability patterns heavily influence the efficiency and effectiveness of enterprise resource management. Most existing process scheduling and resource management approaches tend to tune the process structure to seek better resource utilisation, yet neglect the constraints on resource availability. In this article, we investigate the scheduling of business process instances in accordance with resource availability patterns, to find out how enterprise resources can be rationally and sufficiently used. Three heuristic-based planning strategies are proposed to maximise the process instance throughput together with another strategy based on a genetic algorithm. The performance of these strategies has been evaluated by conducting experiments of different settings and analysing the strategy characteristics.

A Workflow Execution Platform for Collaborative Artifact-Centric Business Processes

To execute an artifact-centric process model, current workflow execution approaches require it to be converted to some existing executable language e.g., BPEL in order to run on a workflow system. We argue that the transformation can incur losses of information and degrade traceability. In this paper, we proposed and developed a workflow execution platform that directly executes a collaborative i.e., inter-organizational workflow specification of artifact-centric business processes without performing model conversion.