business processes in the real world business process technology group winter semester 2009/2010

Business Processes in the Real World

Business Process Technology Group

Winter Semester 2009/2010

BPT Group 22 October 2009

2

Agenda

Official Information

Seminar Timeline

Tasks Outline

Topics


3

Official Information

Title: Business Processes in the Real World

Credit Points: 6

SWS: 4

Registration Deadline: 4 November 2009

• http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/studium/lehrangebot/veranstaltung/business_processes_in_the_real_world.html

• http://bpt.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/Public/BPT-WS200910


4

Seminar Timeline

Today 4

November

26

November

11

February

10

December

12

November

Opening presentation

Topics submission Preliminary

presentation

Paper submission +implementation

How to write a research paper

Short presentation

5

November

How to do a good presentation

Final presentation

21

January

Invited talk + submission of paper draft for review

4

February

28

January

Submission of reviews


5

Grading System

Preliminary presentation


Short presentation

Invited talk + submission of paper draft for review


Final presentation


6

Topic Distribution

Today 4

November

opening presentation

topics submission

three topics ranked by preference+ name, student ID number

[email protected]@hpi.uni-potsdam.de


7

Short Presentation

≈ 5 min talk+ 5 min discussion

problem overview

12

November

Short presentation


8

Preliminary Presentation

≈ 20 min talk+ 10 min discussion

technical aspects

10

December

preliminary presentation


9

Invited talk – 21.01.2010

Roundtrip Business Process Management

Oracle provides leading products for business process management through a pre-integrated portfolio of products that span modeling tools for business analysts, developer tools for system integration, business activity monitoring for dashboards, and user interaction for process participants.

Oracle Business Process Analysis (BPA) Suite speeds process innovation by rapidly modeling business processes and converting them into IT executables. Oracle BPA Suite, based on ARIS Technology, delivers a comprehensive set of integrated products that allows business users to design, model, simulate, and optimize business processes. Modeling methods include BPMN and EPCs.

The Business Process Models are than shared as blueprints with the IT to further implement the Business Process in the real life, i.e. the production environment. Execution data is gathered throughout the lifetime and could then be used for the next evolution of the Business Process Model. Throughout the session we will develop the concept and demonstrate the methods and tools using the software from the Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Dr. Jens Hündling

Senior Sales Consultant / Senior Systemberater

Review process

21

January

Submission of paper draft for review

28

January



11

Final Presentation

≈ 20 min talk+10 min discussion

overview of the whole work

4

February

Final presentation


12

Final Paper Submission

max 16 pagesLNCS stylePDF

11

February



13

Topics

From Resource Allocation to Monitoring The Case of BPMN to jBPM

Ahmed Awad and Emilian Pascalau

[email protected]

[email protected]


15

Task

■ Problem Description

□ Expressing allocation constraints for resources at design time is not sufficient to guarantee correct execution

□ Allocation constraints must be monitored at the process execution time to ensure control

■ Given

□ A process model expressed in, e.g., BPMN / BPEL4People

□ A set of resources distributed among roles

□ A set of resource allocation constraints, e.g., SoD

□ An execution platform, e.g., jBPM

■ Achieve

□ Analyze the support for activity lifecyle

□ Analyze the support for monitoring allocation constraints

□ An instant monitoring of allocation constraints

■ NTH: A prototypical implementation, but at least concrete guidelines on how to proceed


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Example

Create RequestApprove Request

Role: ClerkExpression Language: OCLExpression: Role.allInstances()->select(name=’Clerk’).member

Role: ManagerSoD:{Create Request}Expression Language: OCLExpression: Role.allInstances()->select(name=’Manager’).member->reject(x | Task.allInatances->select(name=’CreateRequest’)-> performer->includes(x))Resources: X,Y,Z

At Runtime: instance ID 445991 Start Create Request(X)2 Complete Create Request(X)3 Start Approve Request(Y)4 Delegate Approve Request(Y, X)5 Complete Approve Request(X)

Violation to SoD and must be blocked

At Design time

Literature:

1. http://jboss.org/jbossjbpm/

2. http://jboss.org/jbossjbpm/jbpm_documentation/ (jBPM 4 User Guide, jBPM Developers Guide)

3. http://www.jboss.org/feeds/post/activity_monitoring_part_1_a_twitter_example

4. BPMN 1.1/2.0 Specification

5. From Regulatory Policies to Event Monitoring Rules: Towards Model-Driven Compliance Automation, 2006. Christopher Giblin, Samuel Müller, and Birgit Pfitzmann. http://domino.watson.ibm.com/library/CyberDig.nsf/papers/8568614878E51E9B85257205003600D7/$File/rz3662.pdf

Spreadsheet-based process modeling – opportunities and limitations

Gero Decker

[email protected]


22

Spreadsheet-based process modeling

Process modeling

•Graphical languages require extensive training•Tool handling requires training

Graphical process modeling involves barriers

Low acceptance for graphical modeling by „casual modelers“

Idea: Spreadsheets enjoy broad acceptance for structured documentation

Task•Survey existing approaches to table-based / text-based process modeling•Survey existing tools•Compare their expressiveness with EPCs and BPMN

•Perform experiments with both modeling styles• Modeling speed?• Model quality?

Towards Measuring Business Processes

Adela del Río Ortega

[email protected]


24

Introduction


25

Clasification Criteria


26

Task

■ Given the previous classification criteria and others found in the literature or of your own, develop a catalogue of KPIs for Business Processes expressed in BPMN.

Literature:

1. BPMN 1.1/2.0 Specification

2. RosellaAiello: Workflow Performance Evaluation. Ph.D. Dissertation, march 2004: www.dia.unisa.it/professori/dottorato/TESI/tesi-aiello.pdf

3. Félix García, Manuel F. Bertoa, Coral Calero, Antonio Vallecillo, Francisco Ruíz, Mario Piatini, Marcela Genero: Towards a consistentterminologyfor software measurement. Informationand Software Technologyvol. 48(8), pp. 631-644, 2006

4. Beatriz Mora, Félix García, Francisco Ruiz, Mario Piattini: SMML: Software MeasureModelingLanguage. 8th OOPSLA WorkshoponDomain-SpecificModeling.

5. BranimirWetzstein, ZhileiMa, Frank Leymann: TowardsMeasuringKey Performance IndicatorsofSemantic Business Processes. Business Information Systems 2008

6. Adela del-Río-Ortega, Mauel Resinas: TowardsmodellingandtracingKey Performance Indicators. PNIS Workshop 2009

7. C. Mayerl, K. Hner, J.U. Gaspar, C. Momm, S. Abeck: Definitionofmetricdependenciesformonitoringtheimpactofqualityofservicesonqualityofprocesses. Second IEEE/IFIP International Workshopon Business-driven IT Management (Munich), pp. 1–10, 2007

8. M. Castellanos, F. Casati, M.C. Shan, U. Dayal: ibom: a platformforintelligentbusinessoperationmanagement. Proceedings. 21st International Conferenceon Data Engineering, 2005., Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, pp. 1084– 1095. 2005

9. KPI library: http://kpilibrary.com/

Empirical Research on a BPMN process repository

Alexander Grosskopf

[email protected]


28

Empirical Research on a BPMN process repository

Context: empirical research, process usage patterns, clusters of models

Task: The Oryx-Editor Repository contains more than 1500 BPMN models. Nobody ever had access to such a large BPMN repository. Thus we expect golden nuggets of insights hidden here.

Familiarize with existing empirical research on process model databases. Try out different techniques to cluster models, e.g. on the element usage, the workflow patterns frequency or ontologically familiar models. It will be on you to identify interesting findings.

Literature:

1. Determining Relevance and Quality in Bottom-Up Business Process Modeling Communities, Jan Brunnert, BPT SS 2009

2. How Much Language is Enough? Theoretical and Practical Use of the Business Process Modeling Notation, zur Muehlen and Recker (2008)

3. Workflow Patterns in BPMN, Attachment B of xBPMN - Thesis, Alexander Grosskopf

4. Oryx-Trunk/tools/statistics (reads BPMN-JSON and generates simple statistics)

Process Model Quality

Matthias Kunze and Alexander Großkopf

[email protected]

[email protected]


30

Process Model Quality

■ research on a set of process model metrics

■ generalized metrics and propose a conceptual framework to capture and combine these metrics

■ apply a combination of these metrics to a set of process models

Which is easier - to understand- to maintain- to apply


31

Task

■ Research on a set of process model metrics; each metric should be evaluated with regard to the aspired quality aspect, and its impact. The metrics found then need to be generalized and a conceptual framework needs to be developed that allows to capture all of these metrics and combine them into a larger measurement for process model quality. Such a framework could be, for instance, a frameworks that combines declarative descriptions of quality aspects and assigns metrics to these descriptions.

■ implement a subset, e.g., three, of the evaluated metrics in an instance of the developed framework and apply it to a set of process models, from the Oryx process model repository.

Literature: 1. Determining Relevance and Quality in Bottom-Up Business Process Modeling Communities (Jan

Brunnert) Paper von Jan Brunnert

2. Elvira Rolón, Laura Sánchez, Félix García, Francisco Ruiz, Mario Piattini, Danilo Caivano, Giuseppe Visaggio, "Prediction Models for BPMN Usability and Maintainability," E-Commerce Technology, IEEE International Conference on, pp. 383-390, 2009 IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing, 2009.

3. Mendling, Jan and Reijers, Hajo and van der Aalst, Wil M. (2008) "Seven Process Modeling Guidelines (7PMG)"

4. Mendling Jan, and Reijers, Hajo and Cardoso Jorge (2007) "What Makes Process Models Understandable?", Business Process Management 2007

Daily life Business Processes on the Web

Emilian Pascalau

[email protected]

Conferences on a Google Calendar

Problem:

Creating list of conferences and adding them on a calendar is a time consuming task. Usually this process involves finding conferences that tackle a specific topic and adding these conferences on a calendar. In addition it might involve also related literature.

Services:

– http://www.cs.wisc.edu/dbworld/browse.html

– http://www.sciencedirect.com/

– http://www.google.com/calendar

Requirements:

All these services must interact in one page.

To allow users to automatically search the DBWorld conference listing service. Interesting entries are those that contain the search term and are not in the past (later than the current date)

To provide a list articles using the Elsevier Science Direct service related to the inserted serach term

Upon request, the DBWorld entries returned by the search should be added as events on a Google Calendar.

To allow the user to scroll through the related articles, he/she will be requested to manually specify the entries to be added on the calendar. In this way the articles of interest will be added to the description section of the events, in the calendar.

All the articles that are of interest (meaning that the user clicks on the associated articles' links) should be added as part of the description in the calendar event.


34

Daily life Business Processes on the Web

Task: Model the proposed use case using BPMN by taking into account the use case’s context (web, browser). Provide a discussion on the suitability of using BPMN to model such use cases. Identify and argue if certain workflow patterns could be used in modeling such an use case. Implement the proposed mashup.

Literature:

1. Weske, M.: Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg (2007)

2. http://www.workflowpatterns.com/

3. Emilian Pascalau and Adrian Giurca: A Rule-Based Approach of Creating and Executing Mashups. Proceedings of the 9th IFIP Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society (I3E2009). LNCS Springer (2009)

Process monitoring capabilities for jBPM and YAWL

Emilian Pascalau and Ahmed Awad

[email protected]

[email protected]


36

Process monitoring capabilities for jBPM and YAWL

Context: Process Monitoring is important for at least several reasons: it can help improve processes; provides a real traces of the process execution; can help in discovering bottlenecks etc.

Task:

■ conceptual framework of these tools in the form of a meta-model, UML class diagrams. The meta-model should depict the conceptual artifacts used in the systems (i.e. processes, activities, monitoring concepts such as events, activity states and resource allocation etc.)

■ execution semantics

■ level of support for execution history (history of instances)

■ discussion on the two meta-models with respect to the concepts in the literature

Literature:

1. http://www.yawl-system.com/

2. http://jboss.org/jbossjbpm/

3. http://jboss.org/jbossjbpm/jbpm_documentation/ (jBPM 4 User Guide, jBPM Developers Guide)

4. http://www.jboss.org/feeds/post/activity_monitoring_part_1_a_twitter_example

5. From Regulatory Policies to Event Monitoring Rules: Towards Model-Driven Compliance Automation, 2006. Christopher Giblin, Samuel Müller, and Birgit Pfitzmann. http://domino.watson.ibm.com/library/CyberDig.nsf/papers/8568614878E51E9B85257205003600D7/$File/rz3662.pdf

A Study on the Level of Unstructuredness of Real World Process Models

Artem Polyvyanyy

[email protected]


38

A Study on the Level of Unstructuredness of Real World Process Models (I)

Produce item Quality checkpass

Repair damage

Evaluate result

Discard defective

item

Rate item “Class B”

pass

fail

fail

… …


39

A Study on the Level of Unstructuredness of Real World Process Models (II)

Context: Process correctness, process structure

Task: Real-world process models capture complex execution scenarios. Often, formalization of complex scenarios results in sophisticated structural patterns in process models. Given repositories of real-world process models (SAP reference models, Oryx public process models), the task is to study the usage of unstructured control flow patterns: How often unstructured patterns happen per-model of a certain size (certain language)? Are there common unstructured patterns? How large do unstructured patterns get? What are behavioral characteristics of unstructured patterns? What heuristics exist (or propose new) for validating the correctness of unstructured patterns?

Literature: 1. Artem Polyvyanyy, Sergey Smirnov, and Mathias Weske. The Triconnected

Abstraction of Process Models. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM). Ulm, Germany, September 2009

2. Jussi Vanhatalo, Hagen Völzer, Jana Koehler: The Refined Process Structure Tree. BPM 2008: 100-115

3. Ralf Laue, Jan Mendling: The Impact of Structuredness on Error Probability of Process Models. UNISCON 2008: 585-590

4. Jussi Vanhatalo, Hagen Völzer, Frank Leymann: Faster and More Focused Control-Flow Analysis for Business Process Models Through SESE Decomposition. ICSOC 2007: 43-55

Obtaining Natural Language Descriptions of Process Specifications

Artem Polyvyanyy

[email protected]


41

Obtaining Natural Language Descriptions of Process Specifications (I)

Produce item Quality checkpass

Repair damage

Evaluate result

Discard defective

item

Rate item “Class B”

pass

fail

fail

… …

“The process fragment starts with the activity “Produce item”. Afterwards, the Quality check is performed. Upon failure of the quality check, repair damagetask is executed …”


42

Obtaining Natural Language Descriptions of Process Specifications (II)

Context: Process abstraction, labeling, natural language process description

Task: The structural process model decomposition (see [1]) fragments a model on sequences, blocks, and unstructured process patterns. Reuse the decomposition to define patterns for mapping formal process specifications to natural language process descriptions. How a process or a process fragment can be mapped onto its textual description based on activity labels and control flow structure? Is the reverse procedure feasible?

Literature:

1. Artem Polyvyanyy, Sergey Smirnov, and Mathias Weske. The Triconnected Abstraction of Process Models. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM). Ulm, Germany, September 2009

2. Meziane, F., Athanasakis, N., Ananiadou, S.: Generating Natural Language Specifications from UML Class Diagrams. Requir. Eng. 13(1): 1-18 (2008)

3. Fliedl, G., Christian, K., Heinrich, C.M.: From Textual Scenarios to a Conceptual Schema. Data Knowl. Eng. 55(1): 20-37 (2005)

MIT Process Handbook Meets Oryx

Sergey Smirnov

[email protected]


44


MIT Process Handbook

… is a process ontology

… contains ≈ 5 000 processes

… describes various relations

- part of

- generalization

Oryx

… a process modeling editor

… web-based editor

… supports collaborative modeling

Oryx

MIT Process Handbook

advanced modeling support

advanced model analysis


45


Task:introduce ontology support into Oryx by the example of the MIT

Process Handbook (create the stencil set, bring the ontology content into Oryx).

Example of questions to answer:■ Are there any limitations of Oryx stencil set mechanism?

References:1. Th. W. Malone, K. Crowston, and G. A. Herman. Organizing

Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1st edition, September 2003

2. http://bpt.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/Oryx

Linguistic Analysis of Labels inReal World Process Models

Sergey Smirnov

[email protected]


47

Linguistic Analysis of Labels in Real World Process Models

Models exhibit different activity labeling styles:

verb + noun (receive order)

noun + noun (confirmation of acceptance)

noun (warehouse)

verb (retire)

Variability of styles hinders model comprehension and analysis.

Problematic labels have to be 1. identified and 2. fixed.

Step 1. implies classification of labels according to labeling styles.

Step 2. requires derivation of an action and an object from the label.


48


Task: develop an algorithm, which classifies activity labels according to their labeling style, and derives actions and objects from the labels

Deliverables: algorithm description

algorithm implementation

installation and deployment instructions for the implementation


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References:1. J. Mendling, H. A. Reijers, and J. C. Recker. Activity Labeling in Process Modeling: Empirical Insights

and Recommendations. Information Systems, 2009.

2. P. Delfmann, S. Herwig, L. Lis, and A. Stein. Eine Methode zur formalen Spezifikation und Umsetzung von Bezeichnungskonventionen für fachkonzeptionelle Informationsmodelle. In MobIS 2008, pages 23-38, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2008.

3. A. G. Miller. Wordnet: A lexical database for English. Communications of the ACM, 38(11):39{41, 1995.

4. The Stanford Natural Language Processing Group. The Stanford Parser: A Statistical Parser. http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml, accessed on 11.08.2009.

5. D. Klein and Ch. D. Manning. Fast Exact Inference with a Factored Model for Natural Language Parsing. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15, pp. 3-10, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

6. The Stanford Natural Language Processing Group. Stanford Log-linear Part-Of-Speech Tagger. http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/tagger.shtml, accessed on 11.08.2009.

7. K. Toutanova and Ch. D. Manning. Enriching the Knowledge Sources Used in a Maximum Entropy Part-of-Speech Tagger. In Proceedings of the Joint SIGDAT Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Very Large Corpora, pp. 63-70, 2000.

8. H. Schmid. TreeTagger - a Language Independent Part-of-speech Tagger. http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/corplex/TreeTagger, accessed on 11.08.2009.

9. C.J. Pollard, and I.A. Sag. Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. In University of Chicago Press, Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, London, Chicago 1994.

10. Berkeley FrameNet project. FrameNet. http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu, accessed on 11.08.2009.

Deriving Behavioural Relations from Finite Prefixes of Petri net Unfoldings

Matthias Weidlich

[email protected]


51


Get Contact

Contact Customer

Close Deal

Negotiate Contract

Conclusion of contract?

yes

no

Approvalby Country-

Manager

Approvalby Sales

Submit Quote

High value?

yes

no

Negotiate Contract

Conclusion of contract?

yes

no

High value?

yes

no

Contact Customer

Prepare Quote

Ask for Response

still interested

else

Contact from

Marketing

Request for Quote

Send Quote

Contact from Fair

2 weeks

Pos. Response

Neg. Response

Close Deal

Approvalby Country-

Manager

Approvalby Sales


52


■ Consistency measure based on behavioural relations: exclusiveness, strict order, concurrency, causality

■ How can finite prefixes be used for efficient computation of these relations?

Literature:

1. Javier Esparza and Keijo Heljanko: Unfoldings – A Partial-Order Approach to Model Checking. Springer (2008).

2. M. Weidlich, J. Mendling, and M. Weske:Computation of Behavioural Profiles of Processes Models. BPT 07-2009.

Model Synthesis based on Behavioural Profiles

Matthias Weidlich

[email protected]


54


Create standard operating procedure

V

Substance Report

Processing

V

Shipping (printing) of reports is to be triggered

Report Shipping

Entering data is complete

Document Temlate

Processing

Processing of Substance Report

Generation Variants

Substance report is to be

created

V

Substance Report

Processing

V

Shipping (printing) of reports is to be triggered

Report Shipping

Processing is completed

Document Temlate

Processing

Processing of Substance Report

Generation Variants

...

XOR

Attributes are to be

formulated in text form

Phrase Processing

Phrases are to be assigned to the characteristics

of the substance properties

Phrase Set Processing


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■ Behaviour of each process variantis characterised by behavioural relations: exclusiveness, strict order, concurrency, causality

■ Behaviour of core process is the union of these relations

■ How can we synthesise a process model out of these relations?

Literature:

1. W.M.P. van der Aalst and A.J.M.M. Weijters. Process Mining. Process-Aware Information Systems. pages 235-255. Wiley & Sons, 2005.

2. Kalinichenko L.A., Stupnikov S.A., Zemtsov N.A.: Extensible Canonical Process Model Synthesis Applying Formal Interpretation. LNCS 3631. Springer-Verlag, 2005.

3. M. Weidlich, J. Mendling, and M. Weske:Computation of Behavioural Profiles of Processes Models. BPT 07-2009.

business processes in the real world business process technology group winter semester 2009/2010

Documents

business process models

business analysts

business users

modeling business processes

business activity monitoring

process participants

modeling tools

modeling methods