AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

Combi-BP: automating the data-oriented optimization in business processes: from declarative to executable models

by Luisa Parody Núñez




Institution: Universidad de Sevilla
Department:
Year: 2014
Record ID: 1126078
Full text PDF: http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/oaites?codigo=44356


Abstract

One of the main objectives of a business expert is to model the business goals of an enterprise process. Several languages have been created to describe the necessary activities to achieve these objectives, especially in the business process context. These languages can be divided into imperative and declarative descriptions. Declarative languages tend to be used when the specific model is unknown, since it is possible to describe what has to be done instead of how it has to be done. Whereas imperative languages permit the description of how the things have to be done, but at the expense of flexibility and adaptability to other scenarios. Declarative descriptions are more flexible, since they permit the model to be described in a more relaxed way, which means that various process executions can follow the same declarative description. Both paradigms are focused on the description of the order of activities, and unfortunately, the data perspective remains incomplete in both paradigms. Furthermore, the optimization of a business goal, which depends on the data exchanged during the execution of the business process, has been neglected in previous proposals. Up to date, there are no solutions that allow the business experts to describe or execute a declarative description where the executed model depends on the data exchanged between the activities involved in each instance, on the contrary, the imperative models can be executed in any commercial Business Process Management System (BPMS). In this thesis dissertation, an approach to support such data-oriented optimization in a business process is presented. A data-oriented optimization problem is a process whose main purpose is to obtain the best business product as the outcome of the process. In order to obtain this business product, the process must combine several activities by taking into account the existing data-structure and data-value dependencies. Both kinds of dependencies are established by a set of constraints that relate the data, which are consumed and provided by the activities, with the data given by the customer. Therefore, the business processes within the scope of our research are those which are centred on developing sound data in business processes, and on analysing how data-structure and data-value dependencies can affect the correct business process execution for the difficult instances. Furthermore, if the data provided at runtime for the activities that conform the model have an insufficient level of quality, then the business process will not be successfully executed. This creates the necessity to include certain data quality management mechanisms in order to guarantee high level of quality for these data. The basis of our proposal is focused on the combination of the advantages of both paradigms: the flexibility of the declarative models, and the automatic execution in a BPMS of the imperative models. On the one hand, we describe a flexible model using a declarative specification where the exchanged data and an optimization objective are…