Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The dynamic nature of incident command systems and their requirement for high flexibility raise a challenge to the research and implementation of workflows. The significance of applying formal approaches to the modeling and analysis of workflows has been well recognized and several such approaches have been proposed. However, these approaches require users to master considerable knowledge of the particular formalisms, which impacts their application on a larger scale. To address these challenges, we developed an intuitive, yet formal approach to workflow modeling, enactment and validation. In this paper, we further develop a set of theorems to support dynamic modeling, modification and on-the-fly verification of the workflows. A prototype has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of the theoretical approach.

It is increasingly recognized that business models offer an abstraction that is useful not only in the exploration of new business networks but also for the design and redesign of operational business processes. Among others, they can be used as input for a risk analysis that is crucial in cross-organizational business process design. However, the notion of value object is up till now not clearly defined. In this paper we investigate the notion of value, value objects and the activities involved when transferring value objects between business actors. We illustrate the proposed value object model by applying it on the well-known conference case.

Inter-organizational controls are measures to ensure and monitor that networked enterprises do not commit a fraud and behave as agreed. Many of such controls have, apart from their control purpose, an inherent component. This feature requires controls to pop-up into business value models, stating how actors create, trade and consume objects of economic value. In this paper, we provide guidelines that can be used to decide whether organizational controls should be part of a value model or not. We demonstrate these guidelines by a case study on the Letter of Credit procedure.

Landscape maps are a technique for visualizing enterprise architectures. They present architectural elements in the form of an easy to understand 2D ’map’. A landscape map view on architectures provides non-technical stakeholders, such as managers, with a high-level overview, without burdening them with technicalities of architectural drawings. In this paper we discuss the use of and techniques for landscape maps. A formal model for landscape maps is introduced as the basis of visualization and interaction techniques. Moreover, we show how a landscape map can be generated from its underlying model. Finally we show several interaction techniques, for example to build a landscape map from scratch, independently of an underlying model, or to change a landscape map together with its underlying model.

Enterprise Systems potentially lead to significant efficiency gains but require a well-conducted configuration process. A promising idea to manage and simplify the configuration process is based on the premise of using reference models for this task. Our paper continues along this idea and delivers a two-fold contribution: first, we present a generic process for the task of model-driven Enterprise Systems configuration including the steps of (a) of configurable reference models, (b) of configurable reference models, (c) of configured reference models to regular build time models, (d) of the generated build time models, (e) of implementation models to provide input to the configuration, and (f) of implementation models to provide input to reference model specification. We discuss inputs and outputs as well as the involvement of different roles and validation mechanisms. Second, we present an instantiation case of this generic process for Enterprise Systems configuration based on Configurable EPCs.

Method Engineering is the discipline for exploring techniques to build project-specific methods for information system development and Computer Aided Method Engineering (CAME) is a kind of computerized tool for supporting the processes to build them. In such method engineering environments, version control and change management for both model descriptions and method descriptions should be seamlessly combined. In addition, when the method being used is changed during a project, we should check whether the current version of a model is still consistent with the newer version of the adopted method. This paper proposes a technique to solve the issues on version control and change management in method engineering processes.

This paper presents an investigation into why software engineers do not keep to the principle of separating business logic from display. The concept of method rationale is used to establish what is supposed to be achieved by following the principle. The resulting model is then contrasted with results from in-depth interviews with practicing engineers about what they want to achieve. The difference between what the principle advocates and what engineers consider beneficial holds the answer to why the principle of separating business logic from display is not maintained. The results suggest that many espoused benefits of the principle do not appeal to engineers in practice and the principle is tailored to make it more useful in particular contexts. Tailoring the principle also brought about other benefits, not explicated by the principle, thus reinforcing the idea that method tailoring is crucial to the successful enactment of information systems engineering methods.

Standardisation of languages in the field of business process management has long been an elusive goal. Recently though, consensus has built around one process implementation language, namely BPEL, and two fundamentally similar process modelling notations, namely UML Activity Diagram (UML AD) and BPMN. This paper presents a technique for generating BPEL code from process models expressed in a core subset of BPMN and UML AD. This model-to-code translation is a necessary ingredient to the emergence of model-driven business process development environments based on these standards. The proposed translation has been implemented as an open source tool.

Effective discovery and sharing of process models within and/or across enterprises are important in process model management. A semantic annotation approach has been applied for specifying process semantic heterogeneity in the semantic process model discovery in our previous work. In this paper, the approach is further developed into a complete and systematic semantic annotation framework. Four perspectives are tackled in our framework: basic description of process models (profile annotation), process modeling languages (meta-model annotation), process models (model annotation) and the purpose of the process models (goal annotation). Ontologies, including modeling ontology, domain specific ontology and goal ontology, are used for annotation of process models to achieve semantic interoperability. A set of mapping strategies are defined to guide users to annotate process models.

A plethora of process modeling techniques has been proposed over the years. One way of evaluating and comparing the scope and completeness of techniques is by way of representational analysis. The purpose of this paper is to examine how process modeling techniques have developed over the last four decades. The basis of the comparison is the Bunge-Wand-Weber representation model, a benchmark used for the analysis of grammars that purport to model the real world and the interactions within it. This paper presents a comparison of representational analyses of several popular process modeling techniques and has two main outcomes. First, it provides insights, within the boundaries of a representational analysis, into the extent to which process modeling techniques have developed over time. Second, the findings also indicate areas in which the underlying theory seems to be over-engineered or lacking in specialization.