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Proceedings ArticleDOI

An Empirical Analysis of Diagnosis of Industrial Business Processes at Sub-process Levels

TL;DR: An empirical diagnostic analysis of control flow errors such as deadlock and lack of synchronization as well as syntactic errors arising out of poor modeling practices for real-life industrial process models is provided.
Abstract: Business process models expressed in languages such as BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) play a critical role in implementing the workflows in modern organizations. However, control flow errors such as deadlock and lack of synchronization as well as syntactic errors arising out of poor modeling practices often occur in industrial process models. In this paper, we provide an empirical diagnostic analysis of such errors for real-life industrial process models. The investigation involved models from different application domains. It turns out that error frequency has non-linear relation with error depth (the maximum depth at which an error occurred) across models from all domains. Error occurrence has statistically significant correlations (p
Citations
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Journal Article
TL;DR: In this article, the connection between formal errors (such as deadlocks) and a set of metrics that capture various structural and behavioral aspects of a process model is discussed, and a comprehensive validation based on an extensive sample of EPC process models from practice is provided.
Abstract: Business process models play an important role for the management, design, and improvement of process organizations and process-aware information systems. Despite the extensive application of process modeling in practice, there are hardly empirical results available on quality aspects of process models. This paper aims to advance the understanding of this matter by analyzing the connection between formal errors (such as deadlocks) and a set of metrics that capture various structural and behavioral aspects of a process model. In particular, we discuss the theoretical connection between errors and metrics, and provide a comprehensive validation based on an extensive sample of EPC process models from practice. Furthermore, we investigate the capability of the metrics to predict errors in a second independent sample of models. The high explanatory power of the metrics has considerable consequences for the design of future modeling guidelines and modeling tools.

147 citations

References
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Book ChapterDOI
25 Nov 2007
TL;DR: This paper discusses the theoretical connection between errors and metrics, and provides a comprehensive validation based on an extensive sample of EPC process models from practice, and investigates the capability of the metrics to predict errors in a second independent sample of models.
Abstract: Business process models play an important role for the management, design, and improvement of process organizations and process-aware information systems. Despite the extensive application of process modeling in practice, there are hardly empirical results available on quality aspects of process models. This paper aims to advance the understanding of this matter by analyzing the connection between formal errors (such as deadlocks) and a set of metrics that capture various structural and behavioral aspects of a process model. In particular, we discuss the theoretical connection between errors and metrics, and provide a comprehensive validation based on an extensive sample of EPC process models from practice. Furthermore, we investigate the capability of the metrics to predict errors in a second independent sample of models. The high explanatory power of the metrics has considerable consequences for the design of future modeling guidelines and modeling tools.

119 citations


"An Empirical Analysis of Diagnosis ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Analysis of metrics (e.g. [1]) and errors (e.g. [2]) at the level of classes (rather than at the level of programs) have been of considerable interest in the programming community....

    [...]

  • ...Related Work Mendling et al. had studied the quality aspects of business process models by analyzing the connection between errors such as deadlock and a set of metrics capturing various structural and behavioral aspects of the models [3]....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A logic circuit is said to be combinational if the function it computes depends only on the inputs applied to the circuit, and is sequential if it depends on some past history in addition to the input inputs as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: A logic circuit is said to be combinational if the function it computes depends only on the inputs applied to the circuit, and is sequential if it depends on some past history in addition to the cu...

84 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper considers industrial business processes modeled in BPMN and uses graph-theoretic techniques and Petri net-based analyses to detect syntactic and control flow-related errors, respectively, and studies the empirical relations between the metrics and process errors.
Abstract: Business processes play an important role in organizations; however, not enough attention is given to analyzing and modeling errors in them. In this paper, we study syntactic and control flow error frequencies in business processes from real industry projects. Our samples come from a number of application domains such as Banking and Capital Markets, Insurance and Healthcare, and Retail. We consider industrial business processes modeled in Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and use graph-theoretic techniques and Petri net-based analyses to detect syntactic and control flow-related errors, respectively. We then use a set of metrics that capture different network characteristics of the models and study the empirical relations between the metrics and process errors. The major results of the empirical investigation are: 1) multiple edges to or from tasks as well as hanging nodes are the predominant forms of syntactic errors, 2) syntactic errors occur frequently in Retail & Logistics domain and significantly less in the Insurance and Healthcare domain, and 3) the probability of error occurrence can be modeled as a function of node size and coefficient of connectivity through a logistic regression model which correctly classified 97.6 percent of the cases.

38 citations


"An Empirical Analysis of Diagnosis ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Analysis of metrics (e.g. [1]) and errors (e.g. [2]) at the level of classes (rather than at the level of programs) have been of considerable interest in the programming community....

    [...]

  • ...The authors came to the conclusion that most of the metrics related to business process models were mere adaptations of software complexity metrics....

    [...]

  • ...As described in [4], we consider two kinds of errors associated with process models: syntactic errors and controlflow related errors....

    [...]

Proceedings ArticleDOI
16 Oct 2006
TL;DR: This paper introduces the concept of a region tree for workflow models that can be used as the central data structure for both workflow analysis and workflow transformation and significantly reduces the overhead.
Abstract: Analysis of workflows in terms of structural correctness is important for ensuring the quality of workflow models Typically, this analysis is only one step in a larger development process, followed by further transformation steps that lead from high-level models to more refined models until the workflow can finally be deployed on the underlying workflow engine of the production system For practical and scalable applications, analysis and transformations of workflows must both be integrated to allow incremental changes of larger workflows In this paper, we introduce the concept of a region tree for workflow models that can be used as the central data structure for both workflow analysis and workflow transformation A region tree is similar to a program structure tree and imposes a hierarchy of regions onto the workflow model It allows an incremental approach to analysis and transformation of workflows and thereby significantly reduces the overhead because individual regions can be dealt with separately

23 citations


"An Empirical Analysis of Diagnosis ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...…partitioned into disjoint sets of decision merges, GM (GandM (synchronizer) and GxorM (merge)) and decision splits, GS (GandS (fork) and GxorS (choice))2, • A set E of events which is a disjoint union of two sets of events Es and Ef , where – Es is the set of start events with no incoming edges....

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Proceedings ArticleDOI
05 Oct 1998
TL;DR: The approach used here is first to replace cycles with matched sub-circuits and then compute the longest simple path of the expanded circuit, which is likely to be the shortest path in the original cyclic combinational circuit.
Abstract: A circuit's performance is usually measured by the delay of its longest path. A combinational circuit may contain cycles. We shall call these type of circuits "cyclic combinational circuits". In order to find the delay of a cyclic combinational circuit we need to find the delay of the longest simple path, however traditional longest path algorithms cannot be applied to circuits containing cycles. Finding the longest simple path in a cyclic combinational circuit has been shown to be NP-hard. In this paper we propose an optimal algorithm to solve this problem. The approach we use here is first to replace cycles with matched sub-circuits and then compute the longest simple path of the expanded circuit. The matched sub-circuits are carefully constructed to preserve the path information of the original cyclic combinational circuit. Since the problem is NP-hard, the proposed algorithm has exponential time complexity in the worst case. Nevertheless, the experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm.

10 citations