Engineering and Integrating Business Processes

Rik Eshuis

Keywords....

Research topics

Process Integration• Process Composition• Process Adaptation• Process Views

Process Engineering• Process Transformations• Process Verification

Motivation process integration

• Organizations collaborate more and more in networks

• Networks are agile and process-oriented• Each network partner has business process• Partners exchange data, but also process status

Context

• Business partners in agile networks need to integrate their business processes

− supply chains, outsourcing, ...

Process Composition: how can partner business processes be coordinated?

Process Adaptation: how can mismatches between partner processes be resolved?

Process Views: how can partners collaborate, yet hide internal business details from each other?

Process Composition

• How to combine different business processes?• Analyse data flow dependencies between processes

• Convert dependencies into block-structured control flow (BPEL)

• Used in IST CrossWork project

Example

R. Eshuis and P. Grefen. Composing Services into Structured Processes. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, 18(2):309-337, 2009

Current state

• Solution for non-interacting processes− each process aggregates into web service

• Solution for interacting processes under development

• Focus on control flow• Future topics: full automation, data flow, dynamic

coordination, ...

Process Adaptation (PhD project Ricardo)

• Resolve behavioural incompatibilities between interacting business processes

Minimal Adaptor

R. Seguel, R. Eshuis and P. Grefen. Generating Minimal Protocol Adaptors for Loosely Coupled Services. In Proc. IEEE ICWS 2010, 2010. To appear

Current state

• Solution for interacting processes− asynchronous/synchronous communication

− application: supply/demain chain management

• Focus on efficiency (minimal adaptors)• Future topics: adaptor selection, deployment of

adaptors, ...

Process Views

• View is public window on private business process• Maintain balance between interest of owner and

client

Example process view

Constructing process views

R. Eshuis and P. Grefen. Constructing Customized Process Views. Data and Knowledge Engineering, 64(2):419-438, 2008.

Current state

• Process views for service outsourcing (with Alex Norta)

• Future work: non-block-structured processes, interacting processes, incorporating data (ontologies), negotiation, ...

Process engineering

• How to construct dependable process models?

Process transformation Process verification

Process Transformation

• Mapping from Petri nets to statecharts• Efficient yet correct

− Structure-preserving

− Behaviour-preserving

• Realized as model transformation and Java program• Application: net-like models (UML, BPMN)

Example

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Another example

AND/OR tree

• Preserve syntactic structure• place BASIC node

• transition hyperedge

• no counterpart of statechart AND/OR tree

• Problems− How to ensure proper nesting of AND nodes?

− How to determine border of AND/OR nodes?

Translation issues

R. Eshuis. Translating Safe Petri Nets to Statecharts in a Structure-Preserving Way. In A. Cavalcanti, D. Dams, editors. Proc. Formal Methods 2009, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5850, pages 239-255, Springer, 2009

Current state

• Model-driven + Java implementation• Future work: extend with data, apply to UML, ...

Process Verification

• Analyse Business Process Models• Focus on diagnosis of errors and giving useful

feedback

R. Eshuis and A. Kumar. An integer programming based approach for verification and diagnosis of workflows. Data & Knowledge Engineering 69(8):816-835, 2010

R. Eshuis and A. Kumar. An integer programming based approach for verification and diagnosis of workflows. Data & Knowledge Engineering 69(8):816-835, 2010

Conclusion

• Research approach: − model driven,

− design oriented,

− formal

− engineering

• Research topics: − cross-organizational BPM

− engineering BPM models

Questions?