Viara Popova

Modeling organizational performance indicators

Performance measurement and analysis is crucial for steering the organization to realize its strategic and operational goals. Relevant performance indicators and their relationships to goals and activities need to be determined and analyzed. Current organization modeling approaches do not reflect this in an adequate way. This paper attempts to fill the gap by presenting a framework for modeling performance indicators within a general organization modeling framework.

Formal modelling of organisational goals based on performance indicators

Every organisation exists or is created for the achievement of one or more goals. To ensure continued success, the organisation should monitor its performance with respect to the formulated goals. In practice the performance of an organisation is often evaluated by estimating its performance indicators. In most existing approaches for organisation modelling the relation between performance indicators and goals remains implicit. This paper proposes a formal framework for modelling goals based on performance indicators and defines mechanisms for establishing goal satisfaction, which enable evaluation of organisational performance. Methodological and analysis issues related to goals are also discussed in the paper. The described framework is a part of a general framework for organisation modelling and analysis.

Artifact Lifecycle Discovery

Artifact-centric modeling is an approach for capturing business processes in terms of so-called business artifacts — key entities driving a companys operations and whose lifecycles and interactions define an overall business process. This approach has been shown to be especially suitable in the context of processes where one-to-many or many-to-many relations exist between the entities involved in the process. As a contribution towards building up a body of methods to support artifact-centric modeling, this article presents a method for automated discovery of artifact-centric process models starting from logs consisting of flat collections of event records. We decompose the problem in such a way that a wide range of existing (non-artifact-centric) automated process discovery methods can be reused in a flexible manner. The presented methods are implemented as a package for ProM, a generic open-source framework for process mining. The methods have been applied to reverse-engineer an artifact-centric process...

Complexity analysis of depth first and FP-growth implementations of APRIORI

We examine the complexity of Depth First and FP-growth implementations of Apriori, two of the fastest known data mining algorithms to find frequent itemsets in large databases. We describe the algorithms in a similar style, derive theoretical formulas, and provide experiments on both synthetic and real life data to illustrate the theory.

Process-oriented organisation modelling and analysis

This paper presents a formal framework for process-oriented modelling and analysis of organisations. The high expressivity of the sorted predicate logic language used for specification allows representing a wide range of process-related concepts (e.g. tasks, processes, resources), characteristics and relations, which are described in the paper. Furthermore, for every organisation, structural and behavioural constraints on process-related concepts can be identified. Some of them should always be fulfilled by the organisation (e.g. physical world constraints), whereas others allow some degree of organisational flexibility (e.g. some domain specific constraints). An organisational specification is correct if it satisfies a set of relevant organisational constraints. This paper describes automated formal techniques for establishing correctness of organisational specifications with respect to a set of diverse constraint types. The introduced framework is a part of a general framework for organisation modelling and analysis.

A specification language for organisational performance indicators

A specification language for performance indicators and their relations and requirements is presented and illustrated for a case study in logistics. The language can be used in different forms, varying from informal, semiformal, graphical to formal. A software environment has been developed that supports the specification process and can be used to automatically check whether performance indicators or relations between them or certain requirements over them are satisfied in a given organisational process.

Rough Sets and Ordinal Classification

The classical theory of Rough Sets describes objects by discrete attributes, and does not take into account the ordering of the attributes values. This paper proposes a modification of the Rough Set approach applicable to monotone datasets. We introduce respectively the concepts of monotone discernibility matrix and monotone (object) reduct. Furthermore, we use the theory of monotone discrete functions developed earlier by the first author to represent and to compute decision rules. In particular we use monotone extensions, decision lists and dualization to compute classification rules that cover the whole input space. The theory is applied to the bankruptcy problem.

A Formal Framework for Modeling and Analysis of Organizations

This paper introduces a formal framework for modeling and analysis of organizations. It allows representing a great variety of organizational concepts and relations that are structured into a number of dedicated perspectives (or views), similar to the ones defined in GERAM [3]. In contrast to many existing enterprise architectures the proposed framework has formal foundations based on the order-sorted predicate logic. This formal basis enables different types of analysis of organizational specifications both of particular views and across different views. Furthermore, the framework provides support for real time management of organizational processes. The framework has been applied in a number of case studies, one of which is discussed in this paper.

From Petri Nets to Guard-Stage-Milestone Models

Artifact-centric modeling is an approach for modeling business processes based on business artifacts, i.e., entities that are central for the company’s operations. Existing process mining methods usually focus on traditional process-centric rather than artifact-centric models. Furthermore, currently no methods exist for discovering models in Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) notation from event logs. To bridge this gap, we propose a method for translating Petri Net models into GSM which gives the possibility to use the numerous existing algorithms for mining Petri Nets for discovering the life cycles of single artifacts and then generating GSM models.

Formal analysis of executions of organizational scenarios based on process-oriented models

This paper presents various formal techniques for analysis of executions of organizational scenarios based on process-oriented models of organizations. Process-oriented models describe (prescribe) ordering and timing relations on organizational processes, modes of use of resources, allocations of actors to processes etc. The actual execution may diverge from scenarios (pre)defined by a model. A part of techniques proposed in this paper is dedicated to establishing the correspondence between a formalized execution (i.e., a trace) and the corresponding process-oriented model. Other techniques proposed in this paper provide the analyst with wide possibilities to evaluate organizational performance and to identify bottlenecks and other inefficiencies in the organizational operation. For the proposed formal analysis the order-sorted predicate Temporal Trace Language (TTL) is used and it is supported by the dedicated software tool TTL Checker. The analysis approaches considered in this paper are illustrated by a case study in the context of an organization from the security domain.