scholarly journals A Formal Model for Configurable Business Process with Optimal Cloud Resource Allocation

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (7) ◽  
pp. 693-713
Author(s):  
Abderrahim Ait Wakrime ◽  
Souha Boubaker ◽  
Slim Kallel ◽  
Emna Guermazi ◽  
Walid Gaaloul

In today’s competitive business environments, organizations increasingly need to model and deploy flexible and cost effective business processes. In this context, configurable process models are used to offer flexibility by representing process variants in a generic manner. Hence, the behavior of similar variants is grouped in a single model holding configurable elements. Such elements are then customized and configured depending on specific needs. However, the decision to configure an element may be incorrect leading to critical behavioral errors. Recently, process configuration has been extended to include Cloud resources allocation, to meet the need of business scalability by allowing access to on-demand IT resources. In this work, we propose a formal model based on propositional satisfiability formula allowing to find correct elements configuration including resources allocation ones. In addition, we propose to select optimal con- figurations based on Cloud resources cost. This approach allows to provide the designers with correct and cost-effective configuration decisions.

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luisa Parody ◽  
María Gómez-López ◽  
Angel Varela-Vaca ◽  
Rafael Gasca

Configuration techniques have been used in several fields, such as the design of business process models. Sometimes these models depend on the data dependencies, being easier to describe what has to be done instead of how. Configuration models enable to use a declarative representation of business processes, deciding the most appropriate work-flow in each case. Unfortunately, data dependencies among the activities and how they can affect the correct execution of the process, has been overlooked in the declarative specifications and configurable systems found in the literature. In order to find the best process configuration for optimizing the execution time of processes according to data dependencies, we propose the use of Constraint Programming paradigm with the aim of obtaining an adaptable imperative model in function of the data dependencies of the activities described declarative.


Author(s):  
Agnes Koschmider ◽  
Andreas Oberweis

Coupling of interorganizational business processes in electronic markets is a difficult and time-consuming task. In practice, business processes are geographically distributed, which makes it particularly difficult for business partners to coordinate their supply chains and customer relationship management with business units. By using formal description languages such as Petri Nets for modeling interorganizational business processes, purely syntactic composition problems of distributed business environments can be solved. However, the missing semantic representation of Petri Nets can hamper the interconnectivity of business processes. Usually, several business partners, even if they share similar demands, have their own specific vocabularies. By representing business processes with Petri Nets in combination with the Web ontology language (OWL), our approach provides flexibility, ease of integration, and a significant level of automation of loosely coupled business processes even if they do not share their respective vocabularies.


Author(s):  
Luisa Parody ◽  
María Teresa Gómez-López ◽  
Ángel Jesús Varela-Vaca ◽  
Rafael M. Gasca

Configuration techniques have been used in several fields, such as the design of business process models. Sometimes these models depend on the data dependencies, being easier to describe "what" has to be done instead of "how". Configuration models enable to use a declarative representation of business processes, deciding the most appropriate work-flow in each case. Unfortunately, data dependencies among the activities and how they can affect the correct execution of the process, has been overlooked in the declarative specifications and configurable systems found in the literature. In order to find the best process configuration for optimizing the execution time of processes according to data dependencies, we propose the use of Constraint Programming paradigm with the aim of obtaining an adaptable imperative model in function of the data dependencies of the activities described declarative.


Author(s):  
T.B. Aldongar ◽  
◽  
F.U. Malikova ◽  
G.B. Issayeva ◽  
B.R. Absatarova ◽  
...  

The creation of information models requires the use of known methods and the development of new methods of formalizing the pre-design research process. The modeling process consists of four stages: data collection on the object of management - pre-project research; creation of a graphical model of business processes taking place in the enterprise; development of a formal model of business processes; business research by optimizing the formal model. To support the creation of workflow management services and systems, the complex offers methodologies, standards and specialized software that make up the developer's tools. This can be ensured only by modern automated methods based on information systems. It is important that the information collected is structured to meet the needs of potential users and stored in a form that allows the use of modern access technologies. Before discussing the effectiveness of FIM, it should be noted that the basic concept of information itself is still not the same. In a pragmatic way, it is a set of messages in the form of an important document for the system. Information can be evaluated not only by volume, but also by various parameters, the most important of which are: timeliness, relevance, value, aging, accuracy, etc. in addition, the information may be clear, probable and accurate. The methods of its reception and processing are different in each case.


Author(s):  
Saad Sultan ◽  
Abdullah Asad ◽  
M. Abubakar ◽  
Suleman Khalid ◽  
Shahab Ahmed ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 908-922 ◽  
Author(s):  
Remco Dijkman ◽  
Oktay Turetken ◽  
Geoffrey Robert van IJzendoorn ◽  
Meint de Vries

Purpose Business process models describe the way of working in an organization. Typically, business process models distinguish between the normal flow of work and exceptions to that normal flow. However, they often present an idealized view. This means that unexpected exceptions – exceptions that are not modeled in the business process model – can also occur in practice. This has an effect on the efficiency of the organization, because information systems are not developed to handle unexpected exceptions. The purpose of this paper is to study the relation between the occurrence of exceptions and operational performance. Design/methodology/approach The paper does this by analyzing the execution logs of business processes from five organizations, classifying execution paths as normal or exceptional. Subsequently, it analyzes the differences between normal and exceptional paths. Findings The results show that exceptions are related to worse operational performance in terms of a longer throughput time and that unexpected exceptions relate to a stronger increase in throughput time than expected exceptions. Practical implications These findings lead to practical implications on policies that can be followed with respect to exceptions. Most importantly, unexpected exceptions should be avoided by incorporating them into the process – and thus transforming them into expected exceptions – as much as possible. Also, as not all exceptions lead to longer throughput times, continuous improvement should be employed to continuously monitor the occurrence of exceptions and make decisions on their desirability in the process. Originality/value While work exists on analyzing the occurrence of exceptions in business processes, especially in the context of process conformance analysis, to the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first work that analyzes the possible consequences of such exceptions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 170
Author(s):  
Hilman Nuril Hadi

Business process model was created to make it easier for business process stakeholders to communicate and discuss the structure of the process more effectively and efficiently. Business process models can also be business artifacts and media that can be analyzed further to improve and maintain organizational competitiveness. To analyze business processes in a structured manner, the effect/results of the execution of business processes will be one of the important information. The effect/result of the execution of certain activities or a business process as a whole are useful for managing business processes, including for improvements related to future business processes. This effect annotation approach needs to be supported by business process modeling tools to assist business analysts in managing business processes properly. In previous research, the author has developed a plugin that supports business analysts to describe the effects semantically attached to activities in the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) business process model. In this paper, the author describes the unit testing process and its results on the plugin of semantic effect annotation that have been developed. Unit testing was carried out using the basic path testing technique and has obtained three test paths. The results of unit test for plugin are also described in this paper.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaghoub rashnavadi ◽  
Sina Behzadifard ◽  
Reza Farzadnia ◽  
sina zamani

<p>Communication has never been more accessible than today. With the help of Instant messengers and Email Services, millions of people can transfer information with ease, and this trend has affected organizations as well. There are billions of organizational emails sent or received daily, and their main goal is to facilitate the daily operation of organizations. Behind this vast corpus of human-generated content, there is much implicit information that can be mined and used to improve or optimize the organizations’ operations. Business processes are one of those implicit knowledge areas that can be discovered from Email logs of an Organization, as most of the communications are followed inside Emails. The purpose of this research is to propose an approach to discover the process models in the Email log. In this approach, we combine two tools, supervised machine learning and process mining. With the help of supervised machine learning, fastText classifier, we classify the body text of emails to the activity-related. Then the generated log will be mined with process mining techniques to find process models. We illustrate the approach with a case study company from the oil and gas sector.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 927-958
Author(s):  
Mohammadreza Sani ◽  
Sebastiaan van Zelst ◽  
Aalst van der

Process discovery algorithms automatically discover process models based on event data that is captured during the execution of business processes. These algorithms tend to use all of the event data to discover a process model. When dealing with large event logs, it is no longer feasible using standard hardware in limited time. A straightforward approach to overcome this problem is to down-size the event data by means of sampling. However, little research has been conducted on selecting the right sample, given the available time and characteristics of event data. This paper evaluates various subset selection methods and evaluates their performance on real event data. The proposed methods have been implemented in both the ProM and the RapidProM platforms. Our experiments show that it is possible to considerably speed up discovery using instance selection strategies. Furthermore, results show that applying biased selection of the process instances compared to random sampling will result in simpler process models with higher quality.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuno Castela ◽  
Paulo Dias ◽  
Marielba Zacarias ◽  
José Tribolet

Business process models are often forgotten after their creation and its representation is not usually updated. This appears to be negative as processes evolve over time. This paper discusses the issue of business process models maintenance through the definition of a collaborative method that creates interaction contexts enabling business actors to discuss about business processes, sharing business knowledge. The collaboration method extends the discussion about existing process representations to all stakeholders promoting their update. This collaborative method contributes to improve business process models, allowing updates based in change proposals and discussions, using a groupware tool that was developed. Four case studies were developed in real organizational environment. We came to the conclusion that the defined method and the developed tool can help organizations to maintain a business process model updated based on the inputs and consequent discussions taken by the organizational actors who participate in the processes.


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