220 research outputs found
Teaching Process Redesign with a Competition
No full textBusiness process redesign is an important part of Business Process Management. However, evaluating the impact of a process redesign in an educational setting poses challenges, because students do not get direct feedback on whether the redesigned process is better. Feedback received from the lecturers on that feels less realistic to them. To address this issue, we developed an assignment that enhances the learning experience by facilitating students in analyzing and redesigning a business process and immediately seeing the effect of their redesign on performance indicators. This paper presents the design and implementation of the assignment. The assignment focuses on the redesign of a business process with respect to operational decisions made in the process. It is presented to the students in the form of a competition to motivate them further. This year, the assignment focused on improving the treatment process of a fictitious hospital by optimizing decisions on patient admission and resource allocation. However, the assignment is developed in a general framework, which facilitates the development of new or modified assignments on a yearly basis. This year, the assignment has been used in courses at two different universities and is planned for further use at three other universities. The assignments that the students handed in showed good understanding by the students and showed that they made a real effort to solve the assignment well. Informal feedback from the students was also positive
Predictive Insights for Personalising Esophagogastric Cancer Treatment Process - A Case Study
Full text linkFor metastatic esophagogastric cancer (EGC), treatments aim to extend survival time, manage symptoms, and enhance the quality of life . However, determining the best treatments for patients with EGC is challenging due to patients’ variability. Personalised treatments supported by predictive models enable tailoring treatment process to individuals. Even so, traditional predictive models often neglect the interaction between treatments, limiting their utility in comprehensive planning. State-of-the-art Predictive Process Monitoring shows promising results in predicting the outcome of the treatment process but often lacks transparency. This paper investigates the potential of supporting healthcare experts in personalising the EGC treatment process, using eXplainable Predictive Process Monitoring methods. A real-world case study among 7,090 patients identifies expert needs for helpful explanations and discusses the capabilities and limitations of existing methods, suggesting future research directions. Our findings demonstrate high-quality explanations with strong fidelity, providing insights validated by expert knowledge. While the resulting explanations are not always actionable, experts acknowledged their value for exploratory analysis
Service-oriented design: a multi-viewpoint approach
Full text linkAs the technology associated with the "Web Services" trend gains significant adoption, the need for a corresponding design approach becomes increasingly important. This paper introduces a foundational model for designing (composite) services. The innovation of this model lies in the identification of four interrelated viewpoints (interface behaviour, provider behaviour, choreography, and orchestration) and their formalization from a control-flow perspective in terms of Petri nets. By formally capturing the interrelationships between these viewpoints, the proposal enables the static verification of the consistency of composite services designed in a cooperative and incremental manner. A proof-of-concept simulation and verification tool has been developed to test the possibilities of the proposed model
Service Composition: Concepts, Techniques, Tools and Trends
Full text linkThis chapter provides an overview of the area of service composition. It does so byintroducing a generic architecture for service composition and using this architecture todiscuss some salient concepts and techniques. The architecture is also used as aframework for providing a critical view into a number of languages, standardizationefforts, and tools related to service composition emanating both from academia andindustry, and to classify them in terms of the concepts and techniques that theyincorporate or support (e.g. orchestration and dynamic service selection). Finally, thechapter discusses some trends in service-oriented software systems engineeringpertaining to service composition
Semantics and analysis of business process models in BPMN
No full textThe Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a standard for capturing business processes in the early phases of systems development. The mix of constructs found in BPMN makes it possible to create models with semantic errors. Such errors are especially serious, because errors in the early phases of systems development are among the most costly and hardest to correct. The ability to statically check the semantic correctness of models is thus a desirable feature for modelling tools based on BPMN. Accordingly, this paper proposes a mapping from BPMN to a formal language, namely Petri nets, for which efficient analysis techniques are available. The proposed mapping has been implemented as a tool that, in conjunction with existing Petri net-based tools, enables the static analysis of BPMN models. The formalisation also led to the identification of deficiencies in the BPMN standard specificatio
Merging business process models
No full textThis paper addresses the following problem: given two business process models, create a process model that is the union of the process models given as input. In other words, the behavior of the produced process model should encompass that of the input models. The
paper describes an algorithm that produces a single configurable process model from a pair of process models. The algorithm works by extracting the common parts of the input process models, creating a single copy of them, and appending the differences as branches of configurable connectors. This way, the merged process model is kept as small as possible, while still capturing all the behavior of the input models. Moreover, analysts are able to trace back which model(s) a given element in the merged model originates from. The algorithm has been prototyped and tested against process models taken from several application domains
Diagnosing differences between business process models
No full textThis paper presents a technique to diagnose differences between business process models in the EPC notation. The diagnosis returns the exact position of a difference in the business process models and diagnoses the type of a difference, using a typology of differences developed in previous work. This in contrast to existing techniques for detecting process differences (by showing non-equivalence), which return simple true/false statements, or statements in terms of a formal semantics. Neither type of statement is helpful to a business analyst not versed in formal semantics. A case study illustrates the usefulness of the technique. It also shows that, although the technique has exponential complexity, it can be used in practice, because of repeated scoping of the models. The technique can be used, for example, to resolve differences between operational process in a merger between organizations
A practitioner's guide for process mining on ERP systems:the case of SAP order to cash
No full text
Runtime party switch in an inter-organizational collaboration
Full text linkDuring the execution of an inter-organizational business-to-business (B2B) collaboration, a collaborating party may drop out for technical reasons or for business reasons. In such a case, the leaving party must be replaced, at runtime, by a new party. Ideally, the new party can pick up where the old party left off. Currently, algorithms exist that can help with the runtime selection of the new party in order to incorporate it in the collaboration. Also, several studies have investigated the theoretical foundations of dynamic business process changes within a single enterprise. However, very few attempts have been made which can help a new party in a collaboration to pick up where the old party left off. Designing such techniques constitutes a challenge due to each party’s autonomy and to privacy policies that emerge in the context of a collaboration. This PhD dissertation aims to address this challenge by providing an overview of the components, algorithms, operations and techniques that are necessary to enable a party in a collaboration to be replaced by another party at runtime. Accordingly, this dissertation consists of the following three research activities. Firstly, it presents a descriptive reference architecture for Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) that facilitates switching parties in inter-organizational collaborations. This reference architecture, called BPMS-RA, has been designed based on a systematic literature survey of existing BPMS architectures. The main purpose of the development of BPMS-RA is twofold: (i) it can be employed as an architectural template for developing a new BPMS by offering two distinct levels of aggregation for the components that comprise a BPMS architecture, and (ii) it enables the analysis and comparison of existing BPMS in terms of their functionalities. Secondly, it introduces a strategy for adapting an inter-organizational collaboration when a global view on the collaboration exists. In this strategy we assume that it is possible to have a central party, called the global controller, that can observe all communication and be the intermediary between all collaborating parties when one party is replaced by another. In this case there is also a model that describes all communications, which is called the choreography model. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by proposing a set of algorithms, operations and techniques (such as rollback and compensation) that facilitate the party switch in the case where a global controller and a choreography model exist. Finally, it describes a strategy for adapting an inter-organizational collaboration when a global view on the collaboration does not exist. In this strategy we assume that there is no global controller in a collaboration and no choreography model of the collaboration. The main challenge in this case is to capture the choreography model by relating the past communications among the collaborating parties that belong to the same thread of collaboration. This challenge is also known as the correlation challenge. This study addresses this challenge by introducing a new process discovery algorithm, called the correlation miner, that facilitates discovery when events (i.e., messages) are not associated with a case identifier. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of these studies, we have developed prototype tools that implement our solutions and we evaluated them in a practical setting. Additional experiments were performed on both synthetic and real-world process models in order to determine the extent to which our proposed solutions are applicable
- …
