Learning context to adapt business processes (original) (raw)

Creating Context-Adaptive Business Processes

Service-Oriented Computing, 2010

As the dynamicity of today's business environments keeps increasing, there is a need to continuously adapt business processes in order to respond to the changes in those environments and keep a competitive level. By using complex event processing, we can discover information that is relevant to our organization, which is usually hidden among the data generated in the environment, and use it to adapt the processes accordingly in order to respond to the changing conditions in an optimal way. Unfortunately, the static nature of business process denitions makes it impossible to adapt them at runtime and the redeployment of a modied process is required. By using a component-based approach, we can transform the existing business processes into dynamically bound components, adding the exibility needed to adapt the processes at runtime. In this paper we present CEVICHE, a framework that combines the strengths of complex event processing and dynamic business process adaptation, which allows to respond to the needs of the rapidly changing environment, and its adaptation language called SBPL, an extension to BPEL which adds exibility to business processes.

CAptEvo: Context-Aware Adaptation and Evolution of Business Processes

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

CAptEvo is a framework for the adaptation and evolution of service-based business processes operating in dynamic execution environments. In this demonstration, we apply the CAptEvo to a case study from the logistics domain and show its advantages in handling highly complex dynamic real-world business applications.

Dynamic Adaptation of Fragment-Based and Context-Aware Business Processes

2012 IEEE 19th International Conference on Web Services, 2012

We propose a comprehensive framework for adaptivity of service-based applications, which exploits the concept of process fragments as a way to model reusable process knowledge and to allow for the dynamic, incremental, contextaware composition of such fragments into adaptable servicebased applications. The framework provides a set of adaptation mechanisms that, combined through adaptation strategies, are able to solve complex adaptation problems. An implementation of the proposed solution is presented and evaluated on a realworld scenario from the logistics domain.

Towards Self-Adaptation and Evolution in Business Process

Business process run-time evolution and adaptivity are two urgent objectives in the research agenda of dynamic workflow execution. Traditional languages as BPMN or BPEL take an imperative style for defining the exact sequences of activities to execute. The imperative approach identifies a narrow space of solution that is generally optimized by the experience. However it does not provide enough freedom of action to bypass obstacles when something exceptional happens. In the wake of declarative specification languages we propose a framework, based on the standard BPMN, in which both business goals and the operative context are monitored for changes during the execution time.

Dynamic context-aware business process

Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing - SAC '10, 2010

Making a business process more dynamic is an open issue, and we think it is feasible if we decompose the business process structure in a set of rules, like ECA (Event Condition Action) rules, each of them representing a transition of the business process, i.e. an edge of the business process graph structure. As a consequence the business process engine can be realized by reusing and integrating an existing Rule Engine. We are proposing a way for representing Dynamic Business Process in terms of Rules based on patterns identification. With this approach it is easy to apply on a business process instance both user-based personalization rules and automatic rules inferred by an underlying context-aware system.

Learning Business Rules for Adaptive Process Models

This work presents a new approach to handling knowledge-intensive business processes in an adaptive, flexible and accurate way. We propose to support processes by executing a process skeleton, consisting of the most important recurring activities of the process, through a workflow engine. This skeleton should be kept simple. The corresponding workflow is complemented by two features: firstly, a task management tool through which workflow tasks are delivered and that give human executors flexibility and freedom to adapt tasks by adding subtasks and resources as required by the context. And secondly, a component that learns business rules from the log files of this task management and that will predict subtasks and resources on the basis of knowledge from previous executions. We present supervised and unsupervised approaches for rule learning and evaluate both on a real business process with 61 instances. Results are promising, showing that meaningful rules can be learned even from th...

REA-based Business Process Adaptation

ICEBE2014, 2014

Business process modeling is an important activity for both organizational design and for the planning and analysis of information systems that support an organization’s business processes. Our goal is to help business analysts produce detailed models of the business processes that best reflect the needs of their organizations. To this end, we propose to, a) leverage the best practices in terms of a catalog of generic business processes, and b) provide analysts with tools to customize those processes by generating new process variants around automatically identified process variants. We use business patterns from the Resource Event Agent ontology to identify variation points, and to codify the model transformations inherent in the generation of the process variants. We developed a prototype, showing the compu- tational feasibility of the approach, and validated the relevance of the variation points, and the correctness of corresponding transformations in the context of ERP key processes, showing the conceptual soundness of the approach.

Research challenges in business process adaptability

Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing - SAC '14, 2014

Modern software systems are more and more deployed within moving and continuously changing contexts. It is not easy to consider all the possible contexts configurations/variances at priori, or it is quite cumbersome and error prone to list and program all this variability points at development time. For such a reason different research trends try to develop mechanisms to express, analyse and support the dynamic adaptation of a software system while it is running.

Adaptation of service-based business processes by context-aware replanning

2011 IEEE International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA), 2011

Business processes are typically used by organizations to meet a specific business goal by executing a set of coordinated activities realized through Web services and service compositions. Operating in open and dynamic environments, business processes often need to be adapted during the execution to react to changes and unexpected problems. The aim of this paper is to provide a dynamic and flexible way to adapt business processes to run-time context changes that impede the achievement of a business goal. We define a formal framework that uses a planning technique to adapt the execution of the service-based business process at runtime in case of context changes. The adaptation enables the business process to continue its normal execution by recovering it to a context, in which the original goal can be achieved. The proposed solution is implemented and validated using a scenario from the logistics domain.