Modeling Flexible Business Processes (original) (raw)

A Semantic Protocol-Based Approach for Developing Business Processes

A (business) protocol is a modular, public specification of an interaction among different roles that achieves a desired purpose. We model protocols in terms of the commitments of the participating roles. Commitments enable reasoning about actions, thus allowing the participants to comply with protocols while acting flexibly to exploit opportunities and handle exceptions. A policy is a (typically private) rule-based description of a participant's business logic that controls how it participates in a protocol. We propose that a business process be conceptualized as a cohesive set of protocols, and be enacted by agents playing specified roles in the protocols in which they participate. The agents would respect the given protocols while adhering to their local policies.

Representing and Reasoning about Commitments in Business Processes

2007

A variety of business relationships in open settings can be understood in terms of the creation and manipulation of commitments among the participants. These include B2C and B2B contracts and processes, as realized via Web services and other such technologies. Business protocols, an interactionoriented approach for modeling business processes, are formulated in terms of the commitments. Commitments can support other forms of semantic service composition as well. This paper shows how to represent and reason about commitments in a general manner. Unlike previous formalizations, the proposed formalization accommodates complex and nested commitment conditions, and concurrent commitment operations. In this manner, a rich variety of open business scenarios are enabled.

Protocol-based business process modeling and enactment

Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Web Services, 2004

Business processes are conventionally modeled as monolithic flows that capture the desired business logic. However, developing process flows is challenging. Because a flow specifies what its participants should do, it restricts the autonomy of its participants, thus limiting their ability to exploit opportunities or accommodate exceptions according to their business preferences.

Protocols for processes: programming in the large for open systems

Sigplan Notices, 2004

The modeling and enactment of business processes is being recognized as key to modern information management. The expansion of Web services has increased the attention given to processes, because processes are how services are composed and put to good use. However, current approaches are inadequate for flexibly modeling and enacting processes. These approaches take a logically centralized view of processes, treating a process as an implementation of a composed service. They provide low-level scripting languages to specify how a service may be implemented, rather than what interactions are expected from it. Consequently, existing approaches fail to adequately accommodate the essential properties of the business partners in a process (the partners would be realized via services)-their autonomy (freedom of action), heterogeneity (freedom of design), and dynamism (freedom of configuration).

Interaction Protocols as Design Abstractions for Business Processes

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2005

Business process modeling and enactment are notoriously complex, especially in open settings, where business partners are autonomous, requirements must be continually finessed, and exceptions frequently arise because of real-world or organizational problems. Traditional approaches, which attempt to capture processes as monolithic flows, have proven inadequate in addressing these challenges. We propose (business) protocols as components for developing business processes. A protocol is an abstract, modular, publishable specification of an interaction among different roles to be played by different participants. When instantiated with the participants' internal policies, protocols yield concrete business processes. Protocols are reusable and refinable, thus simplifying business process design. We show how protocols and their composition are theoretically founded in the -calculus.

Protocols for processes: programming in the large for open systems (extended abstract

2004

The modeling and enactment of business processes is being recognized as key to modern information management. The expansion of Web services has increased the attention given to processes, because processes are how services are composed and put to good use. However, current approaches are inadequate for flexibly modeling and enacting processes. These approaches take a logically centralized view of processes, treating a process as an implementation of a composed service. They provide low-level scripting languages to specify how a service may be implemented, rather than what interactions are expected from it. Consequently, existing approaches fail to adequately accommodate the essential properties of the business partners in a process (the partners would be realized via services)-their autonomy (freedom of action), heterogeneity (freedom of design), and dynamism (freedom of configuration).

OWL-P: A Methodology for Business Process Development

2005

Business process modelling and enactment are notoriously complex, especially in open settings where the business partners are autonomous, requirements must be continually finessed, and exceptions frequently arise because of real-world or organizational problems. Traditional approaches, which attempt to capture processes as monolithic flows, have proved inadequate in addressing these challenges. We propose an agent-based approach for business process modelling and enactment which is centred around the concepts of commitment-based agent interaction protocols and policies. A (business) protocol is a modular, public specification of an interaction among different roles. Such protocols, when integrated with the internal business policies of the participants, yield concrete business processes. We show how this reusable, refinable and evolvable abstraction simplifies business process design and development.

A method for verifiable and validatable business process modeling

2008

We define an extensible semantical framework for business process modeling notations. Since our definition starts from scratch, it helps to faithfully link the understanding of business processes by analysts and operators, on the process design and management side, by IT technologists and programmers, on the implementation side, and by users, on the application side. We illustrate the framework by a high-level operational definition of the semantics of the BPMN standard of OMG.

A Language for the Specification of Administrative Workflow Processes with Emphasis on Actors’ Views

Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2020, 2020

Administrative workflows refer to variable business processes in which all cases are known; tasks are predictable and their sequencing rules are simple and clearly defined. When such processes are collaboratively executed by several actors, it may be desirable, for security reasons (confidentiality), that each of them has at all times, only a partial perception (this is what we call "actor's view") of the current process state. This concern seems sufficiently important to be considered when specifying such workflows. However, traditional workflow specification languages (BPMN, BPEL, YAWL) only partially address it. This is why we present in this paper, a new language for specifying administrative workflows that allows us not only to simply model all of the processes tasks and their sequence, but also and especially to explicitly express the rights of the various actors with respect to each of them, in order to guarantee a certain degree of security. The proposed model is an executable grammatical specification that allows to express using decorated productions, the different types of basic flows (sequential, parallel, alternative and iterative) that are found in workflow specification languages; moreover, it also allows to specify the rights of each actor in each process and on its data in a formalism similar to that used in UNIX-like operating systems.

Business Process Modeling Flexibility: A Formal Interpretation

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development, 2019

Domain experts from both the software and business process modelling domains concur on the importance of having concurring and co-supportive business and software development processes. This is especially important for organisations that develop software for regulated domains where the software development processes need to abide by the requirements of the domain-specific quality assurance standards. In practice, even when following quite mature development processes to develop high assurance systems, software development is a complex activity that typically involves frequent deviations and requires considerable context-sensitive flexibility. We took a business process modelling notation called PML that was specifically designed to be lightweight and allow flexibility, and developed formal semantics for it. PML supports a range of contextsensitive interpretations, from an open-to-interpretation guide for intended behaviour, to requiring a precise order in which tasks must occur. We are using Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP) to model this range of semantic interpretations and the paper presents a high-level view of our formal semantics for PML. We provide examples that illustrate the need for flexibility and how formal semantics can be used to analyse the equivalence of, or refinement between, strict, flexible, and weak semantics. The formal semantics are intended as the basis for tool support for process analysis and have applications in organisations that operate in regulated domains, covering such areas as the certification process for medical device software.