Business Processes in the Real World

1
Business Processes in the Real World

• Business Process Technology Group
• Winter Semester 2009/2010

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
Invited talk submission of paper draft for
review
Paper submission implementation
Short presentation
Submission of reviews
Topics submission
Preliminary presentation
Final presentation
How to do a good presentation
How to write a research paper
Opening presentation
26 November
Today
4 November
11 February
10 December
12 November
5 November
21 January
4 February
28 January
5
Grading System
Invited talk submission of paper draft for
review
Paper submission implementation
Short presentation
Submission of reviews
Preliminary presentation
Final presentation
6
Topic Distribution
three topics ranked by preference name, student
ID number emilian.pascalau_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de ser
gey.smirnov_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de
topics submission
opening presentation
Today
4 November
7
Short Presentation
Short presentation
5 min talk 5 min discussion problem overview
12 November
8
Preliminary Presentation
preliminary presentation
20 min talk 10 min discussion technical
aspects
10 December
9
Invited talk 21.01.2010
Dr. Jens Hündling Senior Sales Consultant /
Senior Systemberater

• 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.
•  

10
Review process
Submission of paper draft for review
Submission of reviews
21 January
28 January
11
Final Presentation
20 min talk 10 min discussion overview of the
whole work
Final presentation
4 February
12
Final Paper Submission
Paper submission implementation
max 16 pages LNCS style PDF
11 February
13
Topics
14
From Resource Allocation to Monitoring The Case
of BPMN to jBPM

• Ahmed Awad and Emilian Pascalau
• Ahmed.Awad_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de
• Emilian.Pascalau_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de

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
At Design time
Resources X,Y,Z
At Runtime instance ID 44599 1 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
17

• Literature
• http//jboss.org/jbossjbpm/
• http//jboss.org/jbossjbpm/jbpm_documentation/
  (jBPM 4 User Guide, jBPM Developers Guide)
• http//www.jboss.org/feeds/post/activity_monitorin
  g_part_1_a_twitter_example
• BPMN 1.1/2.0 Specification
• 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/8568614878E51
  E9B85257205003600D7/File/rz3662.pdf

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Techniques for process controlling

• Gero Decker
• Gero.Decker_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de

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Techniques for process controlling

• Process modeling
• E.g. for the purpose of
• Quality management
• Organizational development
• Requirements analysis
• Process improvement
• ? Process models contain a lot of valuable
  knowledge about an organization

• Management of operations
• Focus on runtime challenges
• Focus on performance indicators
• Based on IT systems that were not implemented /
  configured in a process-oriented way
• ? Systems provide much information about what is
  going on

Make knowledge about processes usable for process
controlling! Process models events
reports produced by IT systems basis for
process-based controlling
20
Techniques for process controlling

• Task
• Identify use cases for process-based
  controlling(based on interviews)
• Survey process mining techniques
• Match process mining techniques with use cases
• Implement proof-of-concept scenario for one
  selected use case
• Literature / inspiration
• processmining.org
• Process monitoring / BAM tools

21
Spreadsheet-based process modeling
opportunities and limitations

• Gero Decker
• Gero.Decker_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de

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?

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Towards Measuring Business Processes

• Adela del Río Ortega
• adeladelrio_at_us.es

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Introduction
25
Clasification Criteria
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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
• BPMN 1.1/2.0 Specification
• RosellaAiello Workflow Performance Evaluation.
  Ph.D. Dissertation, march 2004
  www.dia.unisa.it/professori/dottorato/TESI/tesi-ai
  ello.pdf
• 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
• Beatriz Mora, Félix García, Francisco Ruiz, Mario
  Piattini SMML Software MeasureModelingLanguage.
  8th OOPSLA WorkshoponDomain-SpecificModeling.
• BranimirWetzstein, ZhileiMa, Frank Leymann
  TowardsMeasuringKey Performance
  IndicatorsofSemantic Business Processes. Business
  Information Systems 2008
• Adela del-Río-Ortega, Mauel Resinas
  TowardsmodellingandtracingKey Performance
  Indicators. PNIS Workshop 2009
• C. Mayerl, K. Hner, J.U. Gaspar, C. Momm, S.
  Abeck De?nitionofmetricdependenciesformonitoringt
  heimpactofqualityofservicesonqualityofprocesses.
  Second IEEE/IFIP International Workshopon
  Business-driven IT Management (Munich), pp. 110,
  2007
• M. Castellanos, F. Casati, M.C. Shan, U. Dayal
  ibom a platformforintelligentbusinessoperationman
  agement. Proceedings. 21st International
  Conferenceon Data Engineering, 2005.,
  Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, pp. 1084 1095.
  2005
• KPI library http//kpilibrary.com/

27
Empirical Research on a BPMN process repository

• Alexander Grosskopf
• Alexander.Grosskopf_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de

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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
• Determining Relevance and Quality in Bottom-Up
  Business Process Modeling Communities, Jan
  Brunnert, BPT SS 2009
• How Much Language is Enough? Theoretical and
  Practical Use of the Business Process Modeling
  Notation, zur Muehlen and Recker (2008)
• Workflow Patterns in BPMN, Attachment B of xBPMN
  - Thesis, Alexander Grosskopf
• Oryx-Trunk/tools/statistics (reads BPMN-JSON and
  generates simple statistics)

29
Process Model Quality

• Matthias Kunze and Alexander Großkopf
• Matthias.Kunze_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de
• Alexander.Grosskopf_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de

30
Process Model Quality
Which is easier - to understand - to maintain -
to apply

• 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

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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
• Determining Relevance and Quality in Bottom-Up
  Business Process Modeling Communities (Jan
  Brunnert) Paper von Jan Brunnert
• 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.
• Mendling, Jan and Reijers, Hajo and van der
  Aalst, Wil M. (2008) "Seven Process Modeling
  Guidelines (7PMG)"
• Mendling Jan, and Reijers, Hajo and Cardoso Jorge
  (2007) "What Makes Process Models
  Understandable?", Business Process Management
  2007

32
Daily life Business Processes on the Web

• Emilian Pascalau
• Emilian.Pascalau_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de

33
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 cases 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
• Weske, M. Business Process Management Concepts,
  Languages, Architectures. Springer-Verlag Berlin
  Heidelberg (2007)
• http//www.workflowpatterns.com/
• 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)

35
Process monitoring capabilities for jBPM and YAWL

• Emilian Pascalau and Ahmed Awad
• Emilian.Pascalau_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de
• Ahmed.Awad_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de

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
• http//www.yawl-system.com/
• http//jboss.org/jbossjbpm/
• http//jboss.org/jbossjbpm/jbpm_documentation/
  (jBPM 4 User Guide, jBPM Developers Guide)
• http//www.jboss.org/feeds/post/activity_monitorin
  g_part_1_a_twitter_example
• 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/8568614878E51
  E9B85257205003600D7/File/rz3662.pdf

37
A Study on the Level of Unstructuredness of Real
World Process Models

• Artem Polyvyanyy
• Artem.Polyvyanyy_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de

38
A Study on the Level of Unstructuredness of Real
World Process Models (I)
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
• 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
• Jussi Vanhatalo, Hagen Völzer, Jana Koehler The
  Refined Process Structure Tree. BPM 2008 100-115
  
• Ralf Laue, Jan Mendling The Impact of
  Structuredness on Error Probability of Process
  Models. UNISCON 2008 585-590
• Jussi Vanhatalo, Hagen Völzer, Frank Leymann
  Faster and More Focused Control-Flow Analysis for
  Business Process Models Through SESE
  Decomposition. ICSOC 2007 43-55

40
Obtaining Natural Language Descriptions of
Process Specifications

• Artem Polyvyanyy
• Artem.Polyvyanyy_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de

41
Obtaining Natural Language Descriptions of
Process Specifications (I)
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
• 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
• Meziane, F., Athanasakis, N., Ananiadou, S.
  Generating Natural Language Specifications from
  UML Class Diagrams. Requir. Eng. 13(1) 1-18
  (2008)
• Fliedl, G., Christian, K., Heinrich, C.M. From
  Textual Scenarios to a Conceptual Schema. Data
  Knowl. Eng. 55(1) 20-37 (2005)

43
MIT Process Handbook Meets Oryx

• Sergey Smirnov
• Sergey.Smirnov_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de

44
MIT Process Handbook Meets Oryx

• 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
MIT Process Handbook Meets Oryx

• 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
• 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
• http//bpt.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/Oryx

46
Linguistic Analysis of Labels inReal World
Process Models

• Sergey Smirnov
• Sergey.Smirnov_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de

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
Linguistic Analysis of Labels in Real World
Process Models
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
49
Linguistic Analysis of Labels in Real World
Process Models

• References
• J. Mendling, H. A. Reijers, and J. C. Recker.
  Activity Labeling in Process Modeling Empirical
  Insights and Recommendations. Information
  Systems, 2009.
• 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.
• A. G. Miller. Wordnet A lexical database for
  English. Communications of the ACM, 38(11)3941,
  1995.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• H. Schmid. TreeTagger - a Language Independent
  Part-of-speech Tagger. http//www.ims.uni-stuttgar
  t.de/projekte/corplex/TreeTagger, accessed on
  11.08.2009.
• C.J. Pollard, and I.A. Sag. Head Driven Phrase
  Structure Grammar. In University of Chicago
  Press, Studies in Contemporary Linguistics,
  London, Chicago 1994.
• Berkeley FrameNet project. FrameNet.
  http//framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu, accessed on
  11.08.2009.

50
Deriving Behavioural Relations from Finite
Prefixes of Petri net Unfoldings

• Matthias Weidlich
• Matthias.Weidlich_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de

51
Deriving Behavioural Relations from Finite
Prefixes of Petri net Unfoldings
52
Deriving Behavioural Relations from Finite
Prefixes of Petri net Unfoldings

• Consistency measure based on behavioural
  relations exclusiveness, strict order,
  concurrency, causality
• How can finite prefixes be used for efficient
  computation of these relations?
• Literature
• Javier Esparza and Keijo Heljanko Unfoldings
  A Partial-Order Approach to Model Checking.
  Springer (2008).
• M. Weidlich, J. Mendling, and M.
  WeskeComputation of Behavioural Profiles of
  Processes Models. BPT 07-2009.

53
Model Synthesis based on Behavioural Profiles

• Matthias Weidlich
• Matthias.Weidlich_at_hpi.uni-potsdam.de

54
Model Synthesis based on Behavioural Profiles
55
Model Synthesis based on Behavioural Profiles

• 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
• W.M.P. van der Aalst and A.J.M.M. Weijters.
  Process Mining. Process-Aware Information
  Systems. pages 235-255. Wiley Sons, 2005.
• Kalinichenko L.A., Stupnikov S.A., Zemtsov N.A.
  Extensible Canonical Process Model Synthesis
  Applying Formal Interpretation. LNCS 3631.
  Springer-Verlag, 2005.
• M. Weidlich, J. Mendling, and M.
  WeskeComputation of Behavioural Profiles of
  Processes Models. BPT 07-2009.