Controllability of Time-Aware Processes

at Run Time

Andreas Lanz1, Roberto Posenato2, Carlo Combi2, and Manfred Reichert1

1 Institute of Databases and Information Systems, University of Ulm, Germany2 Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, Italy

Controllability of Time-Aware Processesat Run Time

Contributions:• Modelling time-aware processes– Satisfies a set of temporal constraints e.g. duration

• Check controllability– All temporal constraint – All allowed duration of activity

• An algorithm to check controllability at run timeGap: • No run time support for temporal constraints

Modelling Time-aware Processes

• Map the process model to a process schema– The schema is well-structured (i.e. SESE blocks)– the minimum and maximum number of iterations

for the loops are determined.– At run time process instances are created and

executed based on the process schema – The execution path for each instances are

captured

Time-aware Process Schemas• Activity Duration

• Time needed for execution of an activity.• Time lags between two activities

• Time gap between the beginning of two activities • Cyclic elements

• Time span between activities in a loop• Fixed-date elements

• Specifies when an activity must be started or completed

TPs Can be determined by either domain expert experience or extracted from process logs

Executing time-aware processes

• This paper extends the CSTNU (Conditional Simple Temporal Network with Uncertainty) algorithm by Combi et al. 2012 to check the controllability of a time-aware process schema.

• Their extension includes:– Checking the controllability of the 4 TPs at design

and run time

CSTNU model• To check the controllability each fragment of a

process schema is translated to a CSTNU fragment

As starting time point Ac contingent ending time point AE ending time point

Ordinary constraintsContingent links

Investigations on User Preferences of the Alignment

of Process Activities, Objects and Roles

Agnes Koschmider1, Simone Kriglstein2,3, and Meike Ullrich1

1 Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description MethodsKarlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany{agnes.koschmider,meike.ullrich}@kit.edu

2 SBA Research*, Vienna, Austria3 University of Vienna, Faculty of Computer Science

skriglstein@sba-research.at

Contributions • User preferences for the visualisation of an alignment

between process activities, objects and roles models.• Proposed three visualisation techniques

Visualisation Technique no. 1• Single view technique

Node-link representation Integrated overview about the structure of the process

model Connections between objects and roles for each activityClarity and understand ability of the model depends on

the number of elements.

Visualisation Technique no. 2• Multiple views technique

Supports multiple views Object and organization model are displayed in the same

windowThis representation is beneficial for large modelsUsed for PN-based process modelling tools

Visualisation Technique no.3• Multiple views technique in connection with linking

and brushing– Items selected in one model, cause the corresponding

connected items in the other model be highlighted

Questionnaire

• They conducted a questionnaire to explore the usefulness and performance of these visualisations

• Results:– Usefulness of multiple views over single views:

39.39% agree, 48.48% disagree – Multiple views in combination with linking and

brushing is more useful than multiple views