Business Processes in the Real World
Business Process Technology Group
Winter Semester 2009/2010
Agenda
2
 Official Information
 Seminar Timeline
 Tasks Outline
 Topics
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Official Information
3
Title: Business Processes in the Real World
Credit Points: 6
SWS: 4
Registration Deadline: 4 November 2009
•
http://www.hpi.unipotsdam.de/studium/lehrangebot/veranstaltung/business_processe
s_in_the_real_world.html
•
http://bpt.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/Public/BPT-WS200910
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Seminar Timeline
4
Invited talk +
Paper
submission of
submission
Short presentation
paper draft for
+implementation
review
Submission of
Topics
reviews
Preliminary
submission
presentation
Final
How to do a
presentation
How to write a
good
Opening
research
presentation
presentation
paper
Today
4
5
November
November
November
BPT Group
26
12
10
21
December
November
28
4
February
January
January
11
February
22 October 2009
Grading System
Invited talk +
Paper
submission of
submission
Short presentation
paper draft for
+implementation
review
Submission of
reviews
Preliminary
presentation
Final
presentation
5
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Topic Distribution
6
topics
submission
three topics ranked by preference
+ name, student ID number
emilian.pascalau@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
sergey.smirnov@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
opening
presentation
Today
4
November
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Short Presentation
7
Short presentation
≈ 5 min talk
+ 5 min discussion
problem overview
12
November
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Preliminary Presentation
8
≈ 20 min talk
+ 10 min discussion
preliminary
presentation
technical aspects
10
December
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Invited talk – 21.01.2010
9
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.
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Review process
Submission of
paper draft for
review
Submission of
reviews
21
28
January
January
Final Presentation
11
≈ 20 min talk
+10 min discussion
overview of the whole work
Final
presentation
4
February
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Final Paper Submission
12
Paper
submission
+implementation
max 16 pages
LNCS style
PDF
11
February
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Topics
13
BPT Group
22 October 2009
From Resource Allocation to
Monitoring
The Case of BPMN to jBPM
Ahmed Awad and Emilian Pascalau
Ahmed.Awad@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Emilian.Pascalau@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Task
15
■ 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
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Example
16
At Design time
Create Request
Role: Clerk
Expression Language: OCL
Expression: Role.allInstances()>select(name=’Clerk’).member
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)
BPT Group
Approve
Request
Role: Manager
SoD:{Create Request}
Expression Language: OCL
Expression: Role.allInstances()>select(name=’Manager’).member->reject(x |
Task.allInatances->select(name=’CreateRequest’)->
performer->includes(x))
Violation to SoD and
must be blocked
22 October 2009
Literature:
1. http://jboss.org/jbossjbpm/
2. http://jboss.org/jbossjbpm/jbpm_documentation/ (jBPM 4 User
Guide, jBPM Developers Guide)
3. http://www.jboss.org/feeds/post/activity_monitoring_part_1_a_twi
tter_example
4. BPMN 1.1/2.0 Specification
5. 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/85686
14878E51E9B85257205003600D7/$File/rz3662.pdf
Spreadsheet-based process modeling
– opportunities and limitations
Gero Decker
Gero.Decker@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Spreadsheet-based process modeling
22
Process modeling
•Graphical languages require
extensive training
•Tool handling requires
training
 Graphical process modeling
involves barriers
 Low acceptance for
graphical modeling by „casual
modelers“
BPT Group
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?
22 October 2009
Towards Measuring Business
Processes
Adela del Río Ortega
adeladelrio@us.es
Introduction
24
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Clasification Criteria
25
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Task
26
■ 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:
1. BPMN 1.1/2.0 Specification
2. RosellaAiello: Workflow Performance Evaluation. Ph.D. Dissertation, march 2004:
www.dia.unisa.it/professori/dottorato/TESI/tesi-aiello.pdf
3. 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
4. Beatriz Mora, Félix García, Francisco Ruiz, Mario Piattini: SMML: Software
MeasureModelingLanguage. 8th OOPSLA WorkshoponDomain-SpecificModeling.
5. BranimirWetzstein, ZhileiMa, Frank Leymann: TowardsMeasuringKey Performance
IndicatorsofSemantic Business Processes. Business Information Systems 2008
6. Adela del-Río-Ortega, Mauel Resinas: TowardsmodellingandtracingKey Performance Indicators. PNIS
Workshop 2009
7. C. Mayerl, K. Hner, J.U. Gaspar, C. Momm, S. Abeck:
Definitionofmetricdependenciesformonitoringtheimpactofqualityofservicesonqualityofprocesses.
Second IEEE/IFIP International Workshopon Business-driven IT Management (Munich), pp. 1–10,
2007
8. M. Castellanos, F. Casati, M.C. Shan, U. Dayal: ibom: a
platformforintelligentbusinessoperationmanagement. Proceedings. 21st International Conferenceon
Data Engineering, 2005., Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, pp. 1084– 1095. 2005
9. KPI library: http://kpilibrary.com/
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Empirical Research on a
BPMN process repository
Alexander Grosskopf
Alexander.Grosskopf@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Empirical Research on a
BPMN process repository
28
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:
1. Determining Relevance and Quality in Bottom-Up Business Process
Modeling Communities, Jan Brunnert, BPT SS 2009
2. How Much Language is Enough? Theoretical and Practical Use of the
Business Process Modeling Notation, zur Muehlen and Recker (2008)
3. Workflow Patterns in BPMN, Attachment B of xBPMN - Thesis, Alexander
Grosskopf
4. Oryx-Trunk/tools/statistics
(reads BPMN-JSON and generates simple statistics)
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Process Model Quality
Matthias Kunze and Alexander Großkopf
Matthias.Kunze@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Alexander.Grosskopf@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Process Model Quality
30
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
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Task
31
■ 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:
1. Determining Relevance and Quality in Bottom-Up Business Process Modeling Communities (Jan
Brunnert) Paper von Jan Brunnert
2. 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.
3. Mendling, Jan and Reijers, Hajo and van der Aalst, Wil M. (2008) "Seven Process Modeling
Guidelines (7PMG)"
4. Mendling Jan, and Reijers, Hajo and Cardoso Jorge (2007) "What Makes Process Models
Understandable?", Business Process Management 2007
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Daily life Business Processes on the
Web
Emilian Pascalau
Emilian.Pascalau@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
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.
Daily life Business Processes on the
Web
34
Task: Model the proposed use case using BPMN by taking into
account the use case’s 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:
1. Weske, M.: Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages,
Architectures. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg (2007)
2. http://www.workflowpatterns.com/
3. 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)
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Process monitoring capabilities for
jBPM and YAWL
Emilian Pascalau and Ahmed Awad
Emilian.Pascalau@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Ahmed.Awad@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Process monitoring capabilities for
jBPM and YAWL
36
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:
1. http://www.yawl-system.com/
2. http://jboss.org/jbossjbpm/
3. http://jboss.org/jbossjbpm/jbpm_documentation/ (jBPM 4 User Guide, jBPM
Developers Guide)
4. http://www.jboss.org/feeds/post/activity_monitoring_part_1_a_twitter_example
5. 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/8568614878E51E9B85257
205003600D7/$File/rz3662.pdf
BPT Group
22 October 2009
A Study on the Level of
Unstructuredness of Real World
Process Models
Artem Polyvyanyy
Artem.Polyvyanyy@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
A Study on the Level of Unstructuredness of
Real World Process Models (I)
38
Rate item
“Class B”
pass
Discard
defective
item
…
BPT Group
fail
Evaluate
result
Repair
damage
fail
pass
Produce item
Quality check
22 October 2009
…
A Study on the Level of Unstructuredness of
Real World Process Models (II)
39
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:
1. 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
2. Jussi Vanhatalo, Hagen Völzer, Jana Koehler: The Refined Process Structure Tree.
BPM 2008: 100-115
3. Ralf Laue, Jan Mendling: The Impact of Structuredness on Error Probability of
Process Models. UNISCON 2008: 585-590
4. Jussi Vanhatalo, Hagen Völzer, Frank Leymann: Faster and More Focused ControlFlow Analysis for Business Process Models Through SESE Decomposition. ICSOC
2007: 43-55
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Obtaining Natural Language
Descriptions of Process Specifications
Artem Polyvyanyy
Artem.Polyvyanyy@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Obtaining Natural Language Descriptions of
Process Specifications (I)
41
Rate item
“Class B”
pass
Discard
defective
item
…
fail
Evaluate
result
Repair
damage
fail
pass
Produce item
Quality check
…
“The process fragment starts with the activity “Produce item”. Afterwards, the
Quality check is performed. Upon failure of the quality check, repair damage
task is executed …”
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Obtaining Natural Language Descriptions of
Process Specifications (II)
42
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:
1. 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
2. Meziane, F., Athanasakis, N., Ananiadou, S.: Generating Natural Language
Specifications from UML Class Diagrams. Requir. Eng. 13(1): 1-18 (2008)
3. Fliedl, G., Christian, K., Heinrich, C.M.: From Textual Scenarios to a
Conceptual Schema. Data Knowl. Eng. 55(1): 20-37 (2005)
BPT Group
22 October 2009
MIT Process Handbook Meets Oryx
Sergey Smirnov
Sergey.Smirnov@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
MIT Process Handbook Meets Oryx
44
MIT Process Handbook
Oryx
… is a process ontology
… a process modeling editor
… contains ≈ 5 000 processes
… web-based editor
… describes various relations
… supports collaborative
modeling
- part of
- generalization
Oryx
MIT Process Handbook
advanced modeling support
advanced model analysis
BPT Group
22 October 2009
MIT Process Handbook Meets Oryx
45
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:
1. 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
2. http://bpt.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/Oryx
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Linguistic Analysis of Labels in
Real World Process Models
Sergey Smirnov
Sergey.Smirnov@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Linguistic Analysis of Labels in
Real World Process Models
47
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.
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Linguistic Analysis of Labels in
Real World Process Models
48
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
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Linguistic Analysis of Labels in
Real World Process Models
49
References:
1.
J. Mendling, H. A. Reijers, and J. C. Recker. Activity Labeling in Process Modeling: Empirical Insights
and Recommendations. Information Systems, 2009.
2.
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.
3.
A. G. Miller. Wordnet: A lexical database for English. Communications of the ACM, 38(11):39{41,
1995.
4.
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.
5.
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.
6.
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.
7.
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.
8.
H. Schmid. TreeTagger - a Language Independent Part-of-speech Tagger. http://www.ims.unistuttgart.de/projekte/corplex/TreeTagger, accessed on 11.08.2009.
9.
C.J. Pollard, and I.A. Sag. Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. In University of Chicago Press,
Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, London, Chicago 1994.
10. Berkeley FrameNet project. FrameNet. http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu, accessed on 11.08.2009.
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Deriving Behavioural Relations from
Finite Prefixes of Petri net Unfoldings
Matthias Weidlich
Matthias.Weidlich@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Deriving Behavioural Relations from Finite
Prefixes of Petri net Unfoldings
51
no
Get
Contact
Contact
Customer
Submit
Quote
yes
yes
Negotiate
Contract
Pos.
Response
Contact
from
Marketing
yes
yes
Negotiate
Contract
Contact
Customer
Approval
by Sales
no
Send
Quote
Close
Deal
High value?
no
Conclusion of
contract?
Approval
by CountryManager
Conclusion of
contract?
Approval
by CountryManager
High value?
no
Close
Deal
Approval
by Sales
Prepare
Quote
Neg. Response
Ask for
Response
Contact
from Fair
2 weeks
else
still interested
Request for
Quote
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Deriving Behavioural Relations from
Finite Prefixes of Petri net Unfoldings
52
■ Consistency measure based on behavioural relations:
exclusiveness, strict order, concurrency, causality
■ How can finite prefixes be used for
efficient computation of these relations?
Literature:
1. Javier Esparza and Keijo Heljanko:
Unfoldings – A Partial-Order Approach to
Model Checking. Springer (2008).
2. M. Weidlich, J. Mendling, and M. Weske:
Computation of Behavioural Profiles of Processes Models. BPT 07-2009.
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Model Synthesis
based on Behavioural Profiles
Matthias Weidlich
Matthias.Weidlich@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Model Synthesis
based on Behavioural Profiles
...
54
V
Processing of
Substance Report
Generation
Variants
V
Phrase Set
Processing
Document
Temlate
Processing
XOR
Shipping
(printing) of
reports is to
be triggered
Report
Shipping
V
Phrase
Processing
Phrases are to be
assigned to the
characteristics
of the substance
properties
Create
standard
operating
procedure
Substance
report is to be
created
Substance
Report
Processing
Document
Temlate
Processing
Processing of
Substance Report
Generation
Variants
Substance
Report
Processing
V
Attributes
are to be
formulated in
text form
Shipping
(printing) of
reports is to
be triggered
Report
Shipping
Entering data
is complete
Processing is
completed
BPT Group
22 October 2009
Model Synthesis
based on Behavioural Profiles
55
■ 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:
1. W.M.P. van der Aalst and A.J.M.M. Weijters. Process Mining. Process-Aware
Information Systems. pages 235-255. Wiley & Sons, 2005.
2. Kalinichenko L.A., Stupnikov S.A., Zemtsov N.A.: Extensible Canonical Process
Model Synthesis Applying Formal Interpretation. LNCS 3631. Springer-Verlag,
2005.
3. M. Weidlich, J. Mendling, and M. Weske:
Computation of Behavioural Profiles of Processes Models. BPT 07-2009.
BPT Group
22 October 2009