Adaptation Of Business Processes Research Articles

Digitalization and the Challenges for the Accounting Profession

Accounting profession is traditional profession and accounting rules and principles have been established and are the same for many years. However, globalization of business, stronger regulations and numerous technological solutions and innovations are not bypassing the accounting profession either. Challenges for the accounting profession are reflected in the need for rapid adaptation and transformation of business practice and business processes without abandoning away from basic accounting rules and principles. The aim of this paper is to analyze and systematize the key challenges that digitalization brings for the accounting profession. Research is based on the review of relevant and available professional and academic literature. The results are showing that accounting profession is faced with numerous challenges in the era of digitalization. Key challenges could be systematized in following: the use of big data in accounting and reporting, cloud computing and continuous accounting, artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. The conclusion of this research is that changes in technology and digitalization will have a significant impact on the accounting profession in the coming period. Changes are moving toward reporting on a daily basis, difference on the way of preparing business and strategic plans, implementation of digital wallet and on-line accounting as well as outsourcing of accounting in distant countries. Education system is going to change in circumstances of growing digitalization of business. Also, users of accounting information in digital era are changing; they want accounting information right away when a business event occurs, not with time lag. Those changes will influence on the way accountants carry out their job, it will be necessary the knowledge of new skills especially in engineering, and, finally, that will lead to new types of the accounting professionals.

Multi-valued logic in graph transformation theory and self-adaptive systems

Graph transformation theory uses rules to perform a graph transformation. However, there is no a way to choose between such different transformations in the case where several of them are applicable. A way to get the choice is suggested here based on the comparing of the values of implications which correspond to different transformation variants. The relationship between the topos of bundles, and the set of graphs with the same vertices, is introduced to include logic into graph transformation theory. Thus, one can use the special type of implication and the truth-values set of such a topos to estimate different variants of graph transformations. In this approach, the maximal part of the initial graph towards the terminal one is conserved in the chosen variant. Analysis of self-adaptive systems uses some graph grammars. Self-adaptive systems autonomously perform an adaptation to changes both in user needs and in their operational environments, while still maintaining some desired properties. The suggested way to choose such graph transformation variants may be used to make a choice between different graph grammars in such systems modeling. This approach is illustrated in a model of some business processes, that result in the automated choice of the business process adaptation under the assumption that the process changes are minimal towards the terminal state.

A framework to help decision makers to be environmentally aware during the maintenance of cyber physical systems

For decades, maintenance of facilities and equipment, as well as related activities (from fault detection to prognostics and health management), has a proven impact on efficiency of production systems and is thus still the subject of numerous developments (from corrective to proactive maintenance). These developments are supported by the increase in digital pervasiveness accompanying the Industry 4.0. concept, based in particular on the use of Cyber-Physical Systems. In addition, we are witnessing the growing interest of the political and academic world and public opinion with regard to the sustainable impact of human activity. For company decision-makers, triple bottom line accounting frameworks have been introduced at higher decision levels (strategic) based on economic, social, and environmental performance indicators. This triple preoccupation has not yet been integrated into studies on middle (tactical) and lower (operational) decision levels, and paradoxically, not into production facility health management either. In this paper, we propose the deployment of a framework helping decisions makers to be environmentally aware in the maintenance of cyber physical systems. This framework consists of three key elements: a new maintenance policy called Sustainable Condition-Based Maintenance (SCBM), which requires the assessment of the Remaining Sustainable Life (RSL) as a key indicator; an adaptation and extension of a generic prognostic business process initially proposed for traditional Conditions Based Maintenance (CBM); and an organization adapted to the prognosis of the environmental performance of systems, based on holonic structures. We present the implementation of such a framework on a real Cyber Physical Systems under development.

A Meta-model for context-aware adaptive Business Process as a Service in collaborative cloud environment

With the emergence of cloud computing, building and developing a new Software by SaaS composition becomes a major concern in today’s cloud business. First, the business analyst establishes the Business Process (BP) of the new SaaS. Then, the SaaS composer, based on functional and non-functional requirements, discovers and selects the potential SaaS components that can fill into each of the defined tasks in the BP. Currently, enterprises need more and more flexible SaaS business process as an adaptive composite SaaS from process vendors, which interest on context changes and needs evolutions. A meta-model is proposed in this paper dealing with different concepts involved in business cloud layer. This meta-model, in which both business process and service composition are considered, is accompanied by a case study. Then, an ontology has been developed and an extract of instances has been presented to demonstrate the adaptation process.

Adaptable Cross-organizational Unstructured Business Processes via Dynamic Rule-based Semantic Network

Rapid online adaptation to the new business requirements can improve innovation level and market competency of collaborative organizations. Complex and unstructured processes are provision e-services in collaborative networks through web service inter-connections, which unanticipated changes made it hard to manage them. In a cross-organizational domain, when partners deal with unexpected changes, the received requests are represented as complex theories, and business process adaptation will be more complicated in the occurrence of concept drifts. Rapid prediction and adaptation to new situations need concept drift detection and novel class prediction mechanism for the overall collaborative network processes in both data and control flows. In this article, a new approach to the online reflection of distributed rule concept drifts of collaborative network reference processes is introduced. The solution to the data-informed adaptation of unstructured process employed managing rule concept drifts and cross-organizational processes restructuring via the distributed model with minor updates. The method could react to the new events via an ensemble prediction mechanism. Its architecture has major components for monitoring, dynamic distributed rule reconfiguration, and partners side components. The paper suggests a service-oriented semantic network of distributed rules for e-services provision, substitution, and replacement via management of choreographed web-services. The approach has been validated and verified with real data belonging to the healthcare domain. The results prove the adaptation mechanism efficiency of the daily changes.

Selected Topics on Business Information Systems: Editorial Introduction to Issue 11 of CSIMQ

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays an important role in enterprises, public authorities, inter-organizational networks, company clusters and other kinds of distributed organizations. Business, value creation and supporting activities in organizations are dependent on complex, distributed software and service systems operating in dynamic and often changing environments. In order to produce and supply products and services efficiently, organizations must be able to effectively exchange information between internal stakeholder groups and with external collaborators and customers. A high level of agility and interoperability is required when it comes to meeting the changing requirements from market or technical environments. The demand for interoperability exists at technological, business process and knowledge levels. Methods, theories and tools that ease change and adaptation of business processes, organizations and their supporting IT-systems are needed. The content of this issue presents novel research results in business information systems. Most of the articles in the issue originate from the 15th International Conference on Perspectives in Business Informatics Research (BIR 2016) in Prague (Czech Republic) and the 9th International Workshop on Information Logistics and Applications of Semantic Technologies (ILOG), which was co-located with BIR 2016. The five accepted articles address different technical and methodic aspects of business information systems and various their application fields.

Smart Manufacturing Systems based on Cyber-physical Manufacturing Services (CPMS)

Future manufacturing is becoming “smart” - capable of agilely adapting to a wide variety of changing conditions. This requires production plants, supply chains and logistic systems to be flexible in design and reconfigurable “on the fly” to respond quickly to customer needs, production uncertainties, and market changes. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a promising platform to achieve such manufacturing agility. It has proven effective for business process adaptation. When combined with the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technology and the concept of cyber-physical production systems, it is expected to similarly revolutionize real-time manufacturing systems. This paper proposes a new concept of cyber-physical manufacturing services (CPMS) for service-oriented smart manufacturing systems. In addition, we propose a modeling framework that provides appropriate conceptual models for developing and describing CPMS and enabling their composition. Specifically, the modeling framework separates service provision models from service request models and proposes the use of standardized functional taxonomies and a reference ontology to facilitate the mediation between service requests and service consumptions. A 3D-printing use case serves as an example implementation of an SOA-based smart manufacturing system based on our proposed modeling framework.

Big data in the Danish industry: application and value creation

PurposeThe development within storage and processing technologies combined with the growing collection of data has created opportunities for companies to create value through the application of big data. The purpose of this paper is to focus on how small and medium-sized companies in Denmark are using big data to create value.Design/methodology/approachThe research is based on a literature review and on data collected from 457 Danish companies through an online survey. The paper looks at big data from the perspective of SMEs in order to answer the following research question: to what extent does the application of big data create value for small and medium-sized companies.FindingsThe findings show clear links between the application of big data and value creation. The analysis also shows that the value created through big data does not arise from data or technology alone but is dependent on the organizational context and managerial action. A holistic perspective on big data is advocated, not only focusing on the capture, storage, and analysis of data, but also leadership through goal setting and alignment of business strategies and goals, IT capabilities, and analytical skills. Managers are advised to communicate the business value of big data, adapt business processes to data-driven business opportunities, and in general act on the basis of data.Originality/valueThe paper provides researchers and practitioners with empirically based insights into how the application of big data creates value for SMEs.

METHOD OF ADAPTIVE PROCESS MANAGEMENT USING CASE BASED REASONING

Case-based approach aims to use existing experience in dealing with new challenges. Case includes experience in a structured performance objectives as well as a description of its process solutions. In implementing the approach of case precedent adaptation procedure is performed prior to the relevant management process. In process management it is not possible to adapt business processes and change the sequence of their works at run time, which is especially important when you access shared resources. This shows the relevance of the problem of adaptive business process management. A method for adaptive process management using case – based reasoning is proposed. The method comprises the following steps: adaptation of precedent process models; execution of processes according to a predetermined pattern in a sequence of actions; adding a new process to the set of executable given the delays in access to shared resources. The proposed method, in contrast to the existing implements the management of multiple business processes that use shared resources. The method makes it possible to assess the feasibility of time constraints.

Business process flexibility - a systematic literature review with a software systems perspective

Business Process flexibility supports organizations in changing their everyday work activities to remain competitive. Since much research has been done on this topic a better awareness on the current state of knowledge is needed. This paper reports the results of a systematic literature review to develop a map on Business Process flexibility with a special focus on software systems related aspects. It covers a spectrum of the state of the art from academic point of view. It includes 164 research works from the main computer science digital libraries. After an introduction into the topic the applied methodology is described. The output of the paper is in the form of schemes and reflections. Starting from the needs for Business Process flexibility, its impact on Business Process life-cycle is introduced. Successively instruments used to express and to support Business Process flexibility are presented together with related validation scenarios. In this paper we also highlight possible future research lines needing further investigations. In particular we identified room for future works in the area of languages for modeling flexibility, on-the-fly verification solutions, adaptation of Business Process running instances, and techniques for evolution recognition.

Business Process Adaptation Based on Process Variants

An extensional method for existing business processes is proposed to adapt new environments based on process variants in this paper. The core processes describing maximal commonalities of process variants are introduced according to inheritance relation. Then, extensional business processes are defined based on the core processes. The algorithms of the core processes and extensional business are given and proved. And the soundness of two kinds of processes is justified. An example shows that extensional business processes can adapt to the new environment better than the original process.

Analyze Requirements for PAIS with Best Practice

Traditional requirements analysis is focused on capture functions of the system that are being built from scratch. As the size and complexity of process-aware information system continues to grow, the use of COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) software packages is being viewed as a solution. Use of COTS packages accelerates the implementation process to some extent, however, it puts enterprises into a dilemma: whether to adapt asis business processes or to customize software packages. In order to help the enterprises get out of the dilemma, a methodology is proposed to automatically elicit software requirement using best practice as domain knowledge. The methodology involves three phases: business modeling, gap detecting and gap bridging. Firstly, VPML is employed to describe as-is business process, Secondly, semantics computing technology is employed to analyze the gap between enterprise needs and COTS software capacity. At last, Goal Reasoning Technology is employed to encourage enterprise users and software vendors take participate in decision making process together.

An Enterprise Systems Model to Deliver Innovation in the Healthcare Industry Based on Cognitive and Social-Tech Engineering

An optimal enterprise system that fosters innovation is based on people, process and technology. However, current enterprise systems lack a significant involvement of the human aspects. An innovation model can incorporate those three components to provide greater value to stakeholders, drive organizational growth, gain a competitive advantage and achieve greater end-user satisfaction. We investigated how an enterprise systems model for open innovation could be created based on existing innovation socio-technical frameworks and how that model may benefit the UK National Health Service (NHS). We carried out a literature review of enterprise systems models, cognitive and social-tech engineering and innovation management. Two researchers undertook a thematic analysis of 46 academic papers. Themes included business sectors, types of innovation strategy and the use of cognitive and social-tech engineering elements. Results show that little application of innovation models within the healthcare sector has been undertaken to foster innovation. We suggest that existing innovation frameworks such as the Innovation Pentathlon Framework, the NASA's partnering incentive and the Tesco club card scheme may be the basis for the creation of a healthcare innovation model that incorporates substantive human aspects, including human cognition and human reward. Since the cost of missing medical appointments in the NHS is around $1390 million dollars per year, our innovation model may be implemented to improve patient attendance to family doctors and hospital appointments. The model strategy comprises rewarding people with shopping vouchers (Tesco club card points or nectar points) each time they confirm or cancel a medical appointment online or by SMS text message. With this model, the NHS would improve the management of their resources, may improve the quality of service and may have higher user satisfaction. Nevertheless, future challenges may include the adaptation of current NHS business processes and the management of the collaboration with private organizations.

A method to infer the need to update situations in business process adaptation

Contextual knowledge is an essential resource for adapting business processes in order to keep them aligned with its goals. A context-based adaptation environment should learn from the dynamism of the context as well as the decisions made, and continuously identify new unforeseen situations. Data mining is a possibility to maintain the analysis of the processes updated. This paper presents a method that infers the need to learn new situations that influence a business process execution. The method is based on the results of the Apriori algorithm application. Case studies were conducted to evaluate the proposal. We observed evidences of context changes over time and the potential to learn with this dynamics through the method proposed.

Business-Driven Process Fragment Selections in RESTful Business Processes

Past work showed that runtime adaptability of business processes can be improved by applying Representational State Transfer (REST) to design and implementation of business processes. However, the existing solutions for RESTful business processes (RESTfulBP) were focused on manual selection of process fragments to be composed at runtime. In this paper, we propose solutions that enable semi-automatic selection of process fragment at each decision-making point of RESTfulBP. The new built-in middleware MiniZnMASC can provide user based process fragment advice to knowledge workers in ways that achieve better overall business value while satisfying all existing constraints. In addition, we redesign the architecture of RESTfulBP in order to allow the business-driven decision-making solutions. The solutions are evaluated for feasibility, functional correctness, business benefits, and performance.

Approach Based on Web Services for Business Process Adaptation

Abstract Business process lifecycle is chiefly divided into two phases namely modeling and execution. Therefore, flexibility of business process can be taken into account either at build-time or at runtime. The first kind is well supported mainly by declarative modeling paradigms. Nevertheless, many challenges are posed by the second kind of flexibility (such as at which level of abstraction can flexibility be expressed and by what criteria should it be performed) as well as by the business process adaptation when we consider the implementation phase of business process. In this context, our aim in this paper is to propose an approach based on web services in order to support business process adaptation during its implementation. The proposal is to implement as web services the manners in which activities are executed and that can be subject to change. Each manner refers to the actions implementing the current activity. It can then be adapted to execute the same business process in another organization.

Adaptation dynamique de processus métier. Application au circuit du médicament à l’AP-HM

Variability is inherent in health processes and the diversity of implementation cases implies the need to control the modeling and management of those processes as well as their adaptation to highly dynamic environments. Research conducted within the AP-HM fits into this problematic. It is applied to the medication circuit and has led to the proposal of the V-BPMI approach for the description, management and adaptation of business processes. This paper treats the adaptation and presents a solution for dynamic adaptation. Starting from a database of process lines and process variants, a new process is dynamically constructed and deployed in a specific environment. Intentional and contextual descriptions of processes are the key point of the approach. MOTS-CLES : Processus metier, processus de sante, variabilite des processus, ligne de processus, variante de processus, adaptation dynamique.

Гибридная адаптивная технология проектирования бизнес-процессов

The paper explores development of automated system for transforming diagram components of structure modeling language into class diagrams using hybrid adaptive business-processes designing technology that includes IDEF0, UML, OWL, RDF, XML, XSLT. Possibility of defining transformation rules that use ontological description is shown.

Adaptive Business Process Modeling and Analyzing Based on Markov Decision Process

研究移动网络的适变业务流程的建模和模型分析对于部署和执行Web服务应用有着重要的意义。该文通过定义业务流程的相似性及数据类型的相容性，为可适变应用提供了候选集合，使得业务流程能够根据环境的变化动态地进行适变。为了有效地对适变业务流程实例进行分析，该文提出基于马尔科夫决策过程模型的适变业务流程建模方法，采用随机模型检测技术对模型的合理性进行验证和预测。针对具体实例，采用该文提出的方法对视频传输应用进行建模和分析验证，实验结果表明，该文为适变业务流程的建模和分析验证提供了一种有效的方法。

Requirements model driven adaption and evolution of Internetware

Today’s software systems need to support complex business operations and processes. The development of the web-based software systems has been pushing up the limits of traditional software engineering methodologies and technologies as they are required to be used and updated almost real-time, so that users can interact and share the same applications over the internet as needed. These applications have to adapt quickly to the diversified and dynamic changing requirements in the physical, technological, economical and social environments. As a consequence, we are expecting a major paradigm shift in software engineering to reflect such changes in computing environment in order to better address the fundamental needs of organisations in this new era. Existing software technologies, such as model driven development, business process engineering, online (re-)configuration, composition and adaptation of managerial functionalities are being repurposed to reduce the time taken for software development by reusing software codes. The ability to dynamically combine contents from numerous web sites and local resources, and the ability to instantly publish services worldwide have opened up entirely new possibilities for software development. In retrospect to the ten years applied research on Internetware, we have witnessed such a paradigm shift, which brings about many changes to the developmental experience of conventional web applications. Several related technologies, such as cloud computing, service computing, cyber-physical systems and social computing, have converged to address this emerging issue with emphasis on different aspects. In this paper, we first outline the requirements that the Internetware software paradigm should meet to excel at web application adaptation; we then propose a requirement model driven method for adaptive and evolutionary applications; and we report our experiences and case studies of applying it to an enterprise information system. Our goal is to provide high-level guidelines to researchers and practitioners to meet the challenges of building adaptive industrial-strength applications with the spectrum of processes, techniques and facilities provided within the Internetware paradigm.