Analysis of Concurrent Execution of Business Processes (original) (raw)
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Business process management tools have traditionally focused on supporting the modeling and automation of business processes, with the aim of enabling faster and more cost-effective process executions. As more and more processes become automated, customers become increasingly interested in managing process executions. Specifically, there is a desire for getting more visibility into process executions, to be able to quickly spot problems and areas for improvements. The idea is that, by being able to assess the process execution quality, it is possible to take actions to improve and optimize process execution, thereby leading to processes that have higher quality and lower costs. All this is possible today, but involves the execution of specialized data mining projects that typically last months, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and only provide a specialized, narrow solution whose applicability is often relatively short in time, due to the ever changing business and IT environments. Still, the need is such that companies undertake these efforts.
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Both specification and verification of business processes are gaining more and more attention in the field. Most of the existing works in the last years are dealing with important, yet very specialized, issues. Among these, we can enumerate compensation constructs to cope with exceptions generated by long running business transactions, fully programmable fault and compensation handling mechanism, web service area, scope-based compensation and shared-labels for synchronization, and so on. The main purpose of this paper is to present a semi-automatized framework to describe and analyse business processes. Business analysts can now use a simple specification language (e.g., BPMN [Obj06]) to describe any type of activity in a company, in a concurrent and modular fashion. The associated programs (e.g., BPDs [Obj06]) have to be executed in an appropriate language (e.g., BPEL4WS [ACD+03]). Much more, they have to be confirmed to be sound, via some prescribed (a priori) conditions. We suggest how all the issues can be embedded in a unifying computer tool. We link our work with similar approaches and we justify our particular choices (besides BPMN and BPD): the TLA+ language for expressing the imposed behavioural conditions and Petri Nets ([EB87], [EB88]) to describe an intermediate semantics. In fact, we want to manage in an appropriate way the general relationship diagram (Fig. 1). Examples and case studies are provided. General relationship diagram
Complete and Interpretable Conformance Checking of Business Processes
This article presents a method for checking the conformance between an event log capturing the actual execution of a business process, and a model capturing its expected or normative execution. Given a business process model and an event log, the method returns a set of statements in natural language describing the behavior allowed by the process model but not observed in the log and vice versa. The method relies on a unified representation of process models and event logs based on a well-known model of concurrency, namely event structures. Specifically, the problem of conformance checking is approached by folding the input event log into an event structure, unfolding the process model into another event structure, and comparing the two event structures via an error-correcting synchronized product. Each behavioral difference detected in the synchronized product is then verbalized as a natural language statement. An empirical evaluation shows that the proposed method scales up to real-life datasets while producing more concise and higher-level difference descriptions than state-of-the-art conformance checking methods.
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It is common for business processes to exhibit a high degree of internal heterogeneity, in the sense that the executions of the process differ widely from each other due to contextual factors, human factors, or deliberate business decisions. For example, a quote-to-cash process in a multinational company is typically executed differently across different countries or even across different regions in the same country. Similarly, an insurance claims handling process might be executed differently across different claims handling centres or across multiple teams within the same claims handling centre. A subset of executions of a business process that can be distinguished from others based on a given predicate (e.g. the executions of a process in a given country) is called a process variant. Understanding differences between process variants helps analysts and managers to make informed decisions as to how to standardize or otherwise improve a business process, for example by helping them find out what makes it that a given variant exhibits a higher performance than another one. Process variant analysis is a family of techniques to analyze event logs produced during the execution of a process, in order to identify and explain the differences between two or more process variants. A wide range of methods for process variant analysis have been proposed in the past decade. However, due to the interdisciplinary nature of this field, the proposed methods and the types of differences they can identify vary widely, and there is a lack of a unifying view of the field. To close this gap, this article presents a systematic literature review of methods for process variant analysis. The identified studies are classified according to their inputs, outputs, analysis purpose, underpinning algorithms, and extra-functional characteristics. The paper closes with a broad classification of approaches into three categories based on the paradigm they employ to compare multiple process variants. CCS Concepts: • Applied computing → Process mining.
Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Software engineering - ICSE '08, 2008
A business process is composed of a set of interrelated tasks which are joined together by control flow elements. E-commerce systems implement business processes to automate the daily operations of an organization. Organizations must continuously modify their e-commerce systems to accommodate changes to business processes. However, modifying e-commerce systems is a time consuming and error prone task. To correctly perform this task, developers require an in-depth understanding of multi-tiered e-commerce systems and the business processes that they implement. In this paper, we present a business process explorer tool which automatically recovers business processes from three tier e-commerce systems. Developers can explore the recovered business processes and browse the corresponding source code. We integrate our tool with IBM WebSphere Business Modeler (WBM), a leading commercial tool for business process management and modeling. Business analysts could then visualize and analyze the recovered processes using WBM. The business process explorer eases the co-evolution of business processes and their e-commerce system implementation.