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AI-based process model analysis has attracted more and more interest. Model quality is crucial for such research. At present, inter-organizational business process (IOBP) has been widely used in the model design and development of the distributed system. Before implementing the intelligent analysis of the IOBP model, conformance as a foundation for model quality checking plays a key role because it ensures in advance that the participants can successfully interact without violating the global communication constraints imposed by the choreography. In fact, the multi-instance participant is a common requirement in IOBP. This paper provides a formal approach and framework supporting the conformance between BPMN choreography and collaboration while considering multi-instance participants and message communication modes. As a core, the formalization proposed is based on BNF syntax and structured CSP# processes. It can well support multi-instance features and multiple communication modes. Combined with CSP#, the formal definitions of communication modes and verification properties are given. On this basis, an integrated framework is provided to support automated formal verification referring to multiple communication modes. Finally, a set of experiments is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal.

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) plays a significant role in the specification of business processes. To ascertain the validity of BPMN models, a disciplined approach to analyze their behavior is of particular interest to the field of business process management. This paper advocates a semantics-preserving method for transforming BPMN models into New Symbolic Model Verifier (NuSMV) language as a means to verify the models. A subset of BPMN is specified rigorously in the form of a mathematical model. With this foundation in place, the translation for the subset of BPMN notational elements is then driven by a set of formally defined rules. The practicality of our approach is exemplified using an on-line flight reservation service.

ISO 14143-1 specifies that a functional size measurement (FSM) method must provide measurement procedures to quantify the functional user requirements (FURs) of software. Such quantitative information, functional size, is typically used, for instance, in software estimation. One of the international standards for FSM is the COSMIC FSM method — ISO 19761 — which was designed to be applied both to the business application (BA) software domain and to the real-time software domain. A recurrent problem in FSM is the availability and quality of the inputs required for measurement purposes; that is, well documented FURs. Business process (BP) models, as they are commonly used to gather requirements from the early stages of a project, could be a valuable source of information for FSM. In a previous article, the feasibility of such an approach for the BA domain was analyzed using the Qualigram BP modeling notation. This paper complements that work by: (1) analyzing the use of BPMN for FSM in the BA domain; (2) presenting notation-independent guidelines for the BA domain; and (3) analyzing the possibility of using BP models to perform FSM in the real-time domain. The measurement results obtained from BP models are compared with those of previous FSM case studies.

The different views and modeling techniques of both the business analysts and software developers are a common problem in business process modeling. Various modeling approaches result in communication problems, as well as redundancies and inconsistencies in system documentation. Thus, when modeling process-oriented enterprise applications seamless support of both expert groups is necessary. However, current business process management and workflow technologies are not fully integrated with user interaction, nor do they offer an appropriate data model. Based on the requirements of two industrial projects, we developed an integrated framework that combines the best practices from process-oriented and form-based approaches to overcome these shortcomings. The described framework supports the submit/response-style interaction paradigm and is independent of modeling languages and tools. In this work, we will present a detailed description of the proposed framework, its application to an industrial project and a discussion of related work.

This paper presents the concept and realization of configurable resource models as extension of a treatment scheduling system for users in the medical sector. Our approach aims to ease the handling of automated treatment scheduling by domain experts without the immediate assistance of IT-experts. Configurable resource models were integrated into our automated treatment planning system for medical facilities and support a user-friendly configuration of resources such as specialized treatment rooms, medical devices, or medical staff.

In our approach, treatment process models are defined in the BPMN workflow-language by the domain experts. The new concept of configurable resource models allows the end-user to interactively describe the available resources in their environment. These descriptions (i.e. configurable resource objects or CDOs) can then be linked to activities specified in the treatment models. Together, CDOs and the BPMN treatment models are automatically transformed into CSPs, i.e. mathematical descriptions which can be solved by constraint solvers, thus yielding optimal treatment plans.

Model transformation is a keystone in carrying out model-driven development. Currently, many studies have focused on model transformation, those researches study the automatic transformation from PIM to PSM and from PSM to code, but only few have dealt with how the CIM-level model is automatically mapped onto the PIM-level model. Even though some studies have proposed the semi-automatic transformation from CIM-level model to PIM-level model, only few mechanisms are discussed to protect the consistency between the CIM-level model and the PIM-level model in these researches because notation specification of these CIM-level model and PIM-level model does not contain precise semantics. Focusing on workflow perspective, this paper proposes an automatic model transformation approach, which applies a formal model to define the automatic mapping of the workflow from CIM-level model to PIM-level model. This proposal extends Petri nets model elements to define a bridge model, then we use this bridge model to link the CIM-level model (BPMN) and PIM-level model (SCM) following model-driven approach. The metamodels, the transformation rule and the transformation plug-ins have been defined in Eclipse Modeling Framework. Meanwhile, the plug-ins have been empirically validated by a Travel Agency case study. This study shows that using extended Petri nets model as a bridge model to define an automatic model transformation between CIM-level model and PIM-level model is feasible. This approach by means of formal model can ensure the correctness and completeness of the target model, and it can also maintain the consistency between the source model and target model.

Process mining mainly focuses on discovering control flow models, conformance checking and analyzing bottlenecks. It extends the scope by looking at the other perspectives like time, data and resources by connecting events in the event logs to this process model. These perspectives are not isolated and are all related to each other. For each perspective, there is a different technique, which is dedicated to the relevant perspective, applied and these techniques may need to consume the results of one another in a sequence of process mining analyses. As a result, a holistic process model is created by attaching and binding related attributes of the event logs to the backbone (control flow) of the model. Therefore, representing the holistic model and keeping what is produced from each perspective in a secure and immutable way while applying the multiple perspectives become important. In this study, a BPMN-extended Data Model is proposed to put together the models from the multi-perspective process mining and a tool is developed to keep this data model as an asset into a private blockchain developed by using Hyperledger Fabric. The practical relevance and validity of the approach are shown in the case studies that use real-life data from two different domains.

In service-oriented developments, existing studies do not give lots of efforts on a formalized and systematic method for measuring similarities between services for their reuse in business models. This deteriorates the reusability of the constructed service due to the developers’ intuition and informal service analyses. In this paper, we propose a technique for measuring similarity of services by analyzing syntax and semantics between services in the eXtended Layered business process modeling notation (XL-BPMN) model. First of all, the profiles of the formalized attributes for specifying services are defined, and the criteria for determining service similarities are established. To measure similarity between services, a technique both a syntactic similarity analysis facilitated by the XL-BPMN model-based edge counting method and a semantic similarity analysis based on meta data registry (MDR)-applied service attributes is specified. To automate analysis, a tool that can support the semantic similarity analysis technique is implemented. An online shopping mall system is investigated and evaluated to verify the effectiveness of the proposed technique. The similarity measurement technique, which is further formalized at upper business levels, can improve the accuracy of service analyses and enhance service reusability by distinguishing services with high similarity levels as common services.

Business process management is a challenging task that requires business processes being described, executed, monitored and continuously enhanced. This process management lifecycle requires business as well as IT people working together, whereby the view on business process is quite different on both sides. One important means for bridging the gap between both consists in having a modeling notation that can be easily understood but also has a precise semantics and can be used as a basis for workflow execution. Although existing approaches like BPMN and EPCs aim at being such as notation they are already very activity oriented and do not consider the underlying motivations of processes. Introducing the goal oriented process modeling notation (GPMN) a new language is presented that has the objective of bringing together both sides by establishing higher-level modeling concepts for workflows. This results in an increased intelligibility of workflow descriptions for business people and greater consideration for the way processes are described on the business side. The core idea of the approach consists in introducing different kinds of goals and goal relationships in addition to the established activity-centered behavior model. The applicability of the approach is further illustrated with an example workflow from Daimler AG.