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Process modeling

About: Process modeling is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 11639 publications have been published within this topic receiving 223996 citations. The topic is also known as: process simulation.


Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Extant process modeling techniques address different aspects of processes, such as activity sequencing, resource allocation, and organizational responsibilities, but do not deal with important aspects of process design such as process goals.
Abstract: Extant process modeling techniques address different aspects of processes, such as activity sequencing, resource allocation, and organizational responsibilities. These techniques are usually based on graphic notation and are driven by practice rather than by theoretical foundations. The lack of theoretical principles hinders the ability to ascertain the “correctness” of a process model. A few techniques (notably Petri Nets) are formalized and apply verification mechanisms (mostly for activity sequencing and concurrency). However, these techniques do not deal with important aspects of process design such as process goals.

77 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A list of structural metrics that can be used to approximate common performance goals at the stage of process design and how each metric can be calculated and what kind of performance goals it can approximate is suggested.
Abstract: Purpose – The paper aims to provide business process designers a formal yet user friendly technique to evaluate the implications of a process design on process performance even before its implementation.Design/methodology/approach – Based on practical experience, the paper has built on past research to hypothesize structural metrics for business processes that help assess the influence of process design on organizational goals.Findings – This paper suggests a list of structural metrics that can be used to approximate common performance goals (i.e. soft goals) at the stage of process design. Distinct views for process depiction are discussed to explain how each metric can be calculated and what kind of performance goals it can approximate.Research limitations/implications – The paper has assumed an intuitive relationship between process structure and process performance which has to be validated empirically. There is scope for developing formal methods to translate changes in structural metrics to monetary...

76 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jun 2000
TL;DR: A quantitative approach to aid analysis and comparison of static process models is proposed using the process-modelling notation, Role Activity Diagrams (RADs), and it is concluded that counts (measures) may be useful in the analysis ofstatic process models.
Abstract: The upstream activities of software development projects are often viewed as both the most important, the least understood, and hence the most problematic. This is particularly noticeable in terms of satisfying customer requirements. Business process modelling is one solution that is being increasingly used in conjunction with traditional software development, often feeding in to requirements and analysis activities. In addition, research in Systems Engineering for Business Process Change,11Systems Engineering for Business Process Change is a UK research programme funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. highlights the importance of modelling business processes in evolving and maintaining legacy systems that support those processes. However, the major use of business process modelling, is to attempt to restructure the business process, in order to improve some given aspect, e.g., cost or time. This restructuring may be seen either as separate activity or as a pre-cursor to the development of systems to support the new or improved process. The analysis of these business models is, therefore, vital to the improvement of the process and the development of supporting software systems. Supporting this analysis is the focus of this paper. Business processes are typically described with static (diagrammatic) models. This paper proposes a quantitative approach to aid analysis and comparison of these models. This is illustrated using the process-modelling notation, Role Activity Diagrams (RADs). We studied 10 prototyping processes across a number of organisations and found that roles of the same type exhibited similar levels of coupling across processes. Where roles did not adhere to tentative threshold values, further investigation revealed unusual circumstances or hidden behaviour. Notably, analysis of the prototyping roles (which exhibited the greatest variation in coupling), found that coupling was highly correlated with the size of the development team and the number of participants. This suggests that prototyping in large projects had a different process to that for small projects and required more mechanisms for communication. We conclude that counts (measures) may be useful in the analysis of static process models.

76 citations

01 May 2005
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors address the potential semantic weaknesses of using ebXML alone for process interoperation between enterprise systems and find that users lack important implementation information because of representational deficiencies; due to ontological redundancy, the complexity of the specification is unnecessarily increased; and, users of the specifications have to bring in extra-model knowledge to understand constructs in the specification due to instances of ontological excess.
Abstract: Enterprise systems interoperability (ESI) is an important topic for business currently. This situation is evidenced, at least in part, by the number and extent of potential candidate protocols for such process interoperation, viz., ebXML, BPML, BPEL, and WSCI. Wide-ranging support for each of these candidate standards already exists. However, despite broad acceptance, a sound theoretical evaluation of these approaches has not yet been provided. We use the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) models, in particular, the representation model, to provide the basis for such a theoretical evaluation. We, and other researchers, have shown the usefulness of the representation model for analyzing, evaluating, and engineering techniques in the areas of traditional and structured systems analysis, object-oriented modeling, and process modeling. In this work, we address the question, what are the potential semantic weaknesses of using ebXML alone for process interoperation between enterprise systems? We find that users lack important implementation information because of representational deficiencies; due to ontological redundancy, the complexity of the specification is unnecessarily increased; and, users of the specification have to bring in extra-model knowledge to understand constructs in the specification due to instances of ontological excess.

76 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Sep 2009
TL;DR: The conceptual underpinnings, design, implementation and evaluation of the ProcessSEER tool is described that supports several strategies for obtaining semantic effect descriptions of BPMN process models, without imposing an overly onerous burden of using formal specification on the analyst.
Abstract: A key challenge in devising solutions to a range of problems associated with business process management: process life cycle management, compliance management, enterprise process architectures etc. is the problem of identifying process semantics. The current industry standard business process modeling notation, BPMN, provides little by way of semantic description of the effects of a process (beyond what can be conveyed via the nomenclature of tasks and the decision conditions associated with gateways). In this paper, we describe the conceptual underpinnings, design, implementation and evaluation of the ProcessSEER tool that supports several strategies for obtaining semantic effect descriptions of BPMN process models, without imposing an overly onerous burden of using formal specification on the analyst. The tool requires analysts to describe the immediate effects of each task. These are then accumulated in an automated fashion to obtain cumulative effect annotations for each task in a process. The tool leverages domain ontologies wherever they are available. The tool permits the analyst to specify immediate effect annotations in a practitioner-accessible controlled natural language, which enables formal specification using a limited repertoire of natural language sentence formats. The tool also leverages semantic web services in a similar fashion.

76 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202359
2022184
2021254
2020327
2019368
2018395