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.

Schema Evolution in Process Management Systems

Abstract: Continuously arising new trends in information technology and developments at the (e-business) market let companies crave for automated business process support. Process management systems offer the promising possibility to (electronically) define, control, and monitor business processes. However, if this technology shall be applicable in practice it must be possible to change running business processes even at runtime. Basically, such process changes can take place at two levels - the process type level and the process instance level. If a process type is modified a new version of the respective process type schema is created. Then, at minimum, the process instances running according to the old process type schema version must be able to finish without being disturbed. However, this simple versioning approach is only sufficient for short-running business processes. For long-running ones like, for example, car leasing contracts or medical treatment processes which may last from 3 up to 5 years, it must be possible to apply the process type changes to the collection of running process instances as well, but without causing inconsistencies or errors in the sequel. Apart from process schema evolution and change propagation a flexible process management system must also enable instance-specific (ad-hoc) changes, for example, if exceptional situations occur. If then a process type change takes place the challenging question arises how to adequately deal with the interplay of process type and process instance changes.

Constructing knowledge-based systems

Abstract: Vital, a four-and-a-half-year ESPRIT II research and development project that involves nine organizations in five countries is discussed. It addresses the problems of effective process modeling for knowledge-based systems, providing guidelines on when to use various knowledge-engineering methods and techniques, and reducing the bottleneck in acquiring expert knowledge by providing both methodological and software support for developing large, industrial, knowledge-based system applications. The project goals, approach, and workbench are outlined, and a case study is described. >

Modelling and engineering the requirements engineering process: An overview of the NATURE approach

Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the process theory developed in the context of the ESPRIT project NATURE.1 This theory proposes means for modelling and engineering the requirements engineering (RE) process. The key element of this theory is a situation-and decision-based process meta-model independent of any RE methodology. The process meta-model acts as a shell for defining process models by instantiation. An enactment mechanism implemented in a tool environment has been defined. It allows execution of process models and provides effective guidance to the requirements engineer. Construction of process models is also supported based on generic method knowledge chunks. The formalization of our approach is based on a free algebra.

SeaFlows Toolset – Compliance Verification Made Easy for Process-Aware Information Systems

Abstract: In the light of an increasing demand on business process compliance, the verification of process models against compliance rules has become essential in enterprise computing. The SeaFlows Toolset featured in this paper extends process-aware information systems with compliance checking functionality. It provides a user-friendly environment for modeling compliance rules using a graph-based formalism and for enriching process models with these rules. To address a multitude of verification settings, we provide two complementary compliance checking approaches: The structural compliance checking approach derives structural criteria from compliance rules and applies them to detect incompliance. The data-aware behavioral compliance checking approach addresses the state explosion problem that can occur when the data dimension is explored during compliance checking. It performs context-sensitive automatic abstraction to derive an abstract process model which is more compact with regard to the data dimension enabling more efficient compliance checking. Altogether, SeaFlows Toolset constitutes a comprehensive and extensible framework for compliance checking of process models.