Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly
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Towards a Business Process Modeling Technique for Agile Development of Case Management Systems
Get PDFA modern organization needs to adapt its behavior to changes in the business environment by changing its Business Processes (BP) and corresponding Business Process Support (BPS) systems. One way of achieving such adaptability is via separation of the system code from the process description/model by applying the concept of executable process models. Furthermore, to ease introduction of changes, such process model should separate different perspectives, for example, control-flow, human resources, and data perspectives, from each other. In addition, for developing a completely new process, it should be possible to start with a reduced process model to get a BPS system quickly running, and then continue to develop it in an agile manner. This article consists of two parts, the first sets requirements on modeling techniques that could be used in the tools that supports agile development of BPs and BPS systems. The second part suggests a business process modeling technique that allows to start modeling with the data/information perspective which would be appropriate for processes supported by Case or Adaptive Case Management (CM/ACM) systems. In a model produced by this technique, called data-centric business process model, a process instance/case is defined as sequence of states in a specially designed instance database, while the process model is defined as a set of rules that set restrictions on allowed states and transitions between them. The article details the background for the project of developing the data-centric process modeling technique, presents the outline of the structure of the model, and gives formal definitions for a substantial part of the model
Value-Based and Context-Aware Selection of Software-Service Bundles: A Capability Based Method
Get PDFIn many application areas, vendors offer to their clients combinations of software products and services, which can be considered as software-service bundles. The clients select a combination of software product and associated service best suited to their individual requirements and circumstances. The bundle usually has to be configured by the vendor to fit the specific situation of the client. When circumstances change, the software-service bundle or its configuration need adaptation. The article proposes a method helping clients to select the most appropriate combination or configuration. The method is based on information sharing between the vendor and client and also supports the continuous improvement of the solution in response to changing circumstances. The method applies principles and techniques of the Capability Driven Development to specify performance objectives and contextual factors affecting delivery of a software-service bundle. Application of the method is shown using an illustrative case of a data processing service from utility industries
A Linguistic-Based Systematic Approach to Complex System Dynamics and its Application to E-government Introduction in Zanzibar
Get PDFSystem thinking has become an effective strategy when dealing with complex systems. Such systems are characterized by mutual interactions, causality and inter-dependency between system components. A typical example is the cooperation between governmental organizations and stakeholder interaction. The complexity of developing an e-government system suggests a more fundamental approach, where the roles of domain expert and system analyst are clearly separated. The main focus of this article is (1) to propose a linguistically-based systematic approach to the construction of models for the dynamics of complex systems, and (2) to propose extended causal diagrams. Our research methodology is based on Design Science. We start from a conceptual language developed for the application domain at hand and use this to define the dynamic factors. Then, we show how the resulting extended causal diagram is transformed into a framework for System Dynamics. We have demonstrated this approach by using a basic form of an e-Government as a running example. Our intention is to use this approach as a basis for a systematic step-wise introduction of e-Government in Zanzibar. Besides, this method is useful for modeling any complex system, especially for the description and evaluation of intended policies
Using Time Clusters for Following Users’ Shifts in Rating Practices
Get PDFUsers that enter ratings for items follow different rating practices, in the sense that, when rating items, some users are more lenient, while others are stricter. This aspect is taken into account by the most widely used similarity metric in user-user collaborative filtering, namely, the Pearson Correlation, which adjusts each individual user rating by the mean value of the ratings entered by the specific user, when computing similarities. However, a user’s rating practices change over time, i.e. a user could start as strict and subsequently become lenient or vice versa. In that sense, the practice of using a single mean value for adjusting users’ ratings is inadequate, since it fails to follow such shifts in users’ rating practices, leading to decreased rating prediction accuracy. In this work, we address this issue by using the concept of dynamic averages introduced earlier and we extend earlier work by (1) introducing the concept of rating time clusters and (2) presenting a novel algorithm for calculating dynamic user averages and exploiting them in user-user collaborative, filtering implementations. The proposed algorithm incorporates the aforementioned concept and is able to follow more successfully shifts in users’ rating practices. It has been evaluated using numerous datasets, and has been found to introduce significant gains in rating prediction accuracy, while outperforming the dynamic average computation approaches that are presented earlier
A Comparative Analysis of Using the Capability Notion for Congruent Business and Information Systems Engineering
Get PDFThe notion of capability has been gaining a growing attention in the business and information system (IS) engineering community due to a number of reasons: it facilitates focus on business investments, it can be used as a baseline for business planning, and it directly leads to service specification and design. It is not however widely known to what extent capability is considered in different modeling approaches, how it is defined, and what purpose it fulfills. This article analyzes how the notion of capability is included in the frameworks spanning from business-oriented such as Business Architecture and Business Value Modeling, to the alignment-oriented represented by Enterprise Architecture (EA), and Enterprise Modeling (EM). The results of the analysis have shown that capability has widespread presence in the frameworks and that its conceptual meaning is largely similar, while the intentions and the mechanisms of its use differ, which raises stimulating opportunities for new contributions and improvements in the field
Human Performance-Aware Scheduling and Routing of a Multi-Skilled Workforce
Get PDFPlanning human activities within business processes often happens based on the same methods and algorithms as are used in the area of manufacturing systems. However, human behaviour is quite different from machine behaviour. Their performance depends on a number of factors, including workload, stress, personal preferences, etc. In this article we describe an approach for scheduling activities of people that takes into account business rules and dynamic human performance in order to optimise the schedule. We formally describe the scheduling problem we address and discuss how it can be constructed from inputs in the form of business process models and performance measurements. Finally, we discuss and evaluate an implementation for our planning approach to show the impact of considering dynamic human performance in scheduling
Capacity Management as a Service for Enterprise Standard Software
Get PDFCapacity management approaches optimize component utilization from a strong technical perspective. In fact, the quality of involved services is considered implicitly by linking it to resource capacity values. This practice hinders to evaluate design alternatives with respect to given service levels that are expressed in user-centric metrics such as the mean response time for a business transaction. We argue that utilized historical workload traces often contain a variety of performance-related information that allows for the integration of performance prediction techniques through machine learning. Since enterprise applications excessively make use of standard software that is shipped by large software vendors to a wide range of customers, standardized prediction models can be trained and provisioned as part of a capacity management service which we propose in this article. Therefore, we integrate knowledge discovery activities into well-known capacity planning steps, which we adapt to the special characteristics of enterprise applications. Using a real-world example, we demonstrate how prediction models that were trained on a large scale of monitoring data enable cost-efficient measurement-based prediction techniques to be used in early design and redesign phases of planned or running applications. Finally, based on the trained model, we demonstrate how to simulate and analyze future workload scenarios. Using a Pareto approach, we were able to identify cost-effective design alternatives for an enterprise application whose capacity is being managed
Capability-Driven Design of Business Service Ecosystem to Support Risk Governance in Regulatory Ecosystems
Get PDFRisk-based regulation and risk governance gain momentum in most sectorial ecosystems, should they be the finance, the healthcare or the telecommunications ecosystems. Although there is a profusion of tools to address this issue at the corporate level, worth is to note that no solution fulfils this function at the ecosystem level yet. Therefore, in this article, the Business Service Ecosystem (BSE) metamodel is semantically extended, considering the Capability as a Service (CaaS) theory, in order to raise the enterprise risk management from the enterprise level up to the ecosystem level. This extension allows defining a concrete ecosystem metamodel which is afterwards mapped with an information system risk management model to support risk governance at the ecosystem level. This mapping is illustrated and validated on the basis of an application case for the Luxembourgish financial sector applied to the most important concepts from the BSE: capability, resource, service and goal
Combining Tools to Design and Develop Software Support for Capabilities
Get PDFAnalyzing, designing and implementing software systems based on the concept of capabilities have several benefits, such as the ability to design efficient monitoring of capabilities and their execution context. Today, there exist new model-driven methods and development tools that support capability-based analysis, design, and implementation. However, there are also a plethora of existing efficient development tools that are currently in use by organizations. In this article, we examine how a new set of capability based tools, the Capability Driven Development (CDD) environment, can be combined with model-driven development tools to leverage both novel capability-based functionality and the proven functionality of existing tools. We base the examination on a case study where an existing model-driven tool is combined with the CDD environment
Natural Model based Design in Context: an Effective Method for Environmental Problems
Get PDFAnalyzing complex problem domains is not easy. Simulation tools support decision makers to find the best policies. Model-based system development is an approach where a model of the application domain is the central driving force when designing simulation tools. State-of-the-art techniques however still require both expert knowledge of the application domain and the implementation techniques as provided by ICT (such as multilevel agent technology). Domain experts, however, usually do not master ICT sufficiently. Modeling is more insightful for the domain expert when its goal is to formalize the language being used in that domain as a semi-natural language. At the meta level, this language describes the main concepts of the type of application domain. The model then is a concretization of this meta model. The main focus of this article is (1) to propose a natural-language-based approach to modeling application domains, (2) to show how these models can be transformed systematically into computational models, and (3) to propose the tool TiC (Tool in Context) that supports the domain expert when developing a model and generating a simulation tool. Our research methodology is based on Design Science. We verify our approach by describing the various transformation steps in detail, and by demonstrating the way of working via a sample session applying a real problem of Laf Forest Reserve deforestation in North Cameroon