Modeling Business Rules Research Articles

Lifecycle Support for IoT-Driven Business Rules

The Internet of Things (IoT) is prevalent in various areas and enables a variety of smart applications such as smart factory, smart home, and smart health. The IoT corresponds to a network of physical objects, fostering the collection and exchange of data over the Internet. Each physical object is equipped with sensors, actuators, and other technologies, and is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system. Business Process Management (BPM), in turn, is concerned with the modeling, execution, discovery, analysis, and monitoring of business processes. By enriching business processes with real-world IoT data and IoT-driven business rules, process automation as well as real-time process monitoring and decision making can be enhanced. Despite the increasing interest in IoT-enhanced business process support, IoT-driven business rules have not been well integrated with business process execution so far. In this context, providing integrated lifecycle support for IoT-driven business rules in BPM systems constitutes a challenge. This paper discusses how to integrate lifecycle support of IoT-driven business rules with BPM systems covering the modeling, execution, monitoring, analysis, and evolution of IoT-driven business rules. Furthermore, all lifecycle phases need to be covered by holistic approaches to IoT-driven business rules. For each lifecycle phase, we elaborate on the requirements emerging in this context and discuss existing approaches.

Modelagem organizacional na gestão de contratos de obras públicas: estudo de caso na Universidade Federal do Ceará

Percebem-se, na administração pública, muitos problemas na contratação de obras e serviços, tais como: não cumprimento do objeto do contrato, atraso na entrega do produto e orçamentos executados superiores aos estimados. A pesquisa tem como objetivo apresentar uma modelagem organizacional para a gestão de contratos de obras públicas, aplicada na Universidade Federal do Ceará. O artigo apresenta como resultado os submodelos organizacionais: modelo de objetivos e regras de negócio, modelo de processo, modelo de atores e recursos desenvolvidos sob a luz da metodologia Enterprise Knowledge Development (EKD). A visão sistêmica, proporcionada pelos submodelos, possibilita a melhoria dos processos e a identificação clara sobre a gestão de contratos, indicando as oportunidades de melhorias. O estudo permite estabelecer estratégias que auxiliam na identificação dos entraves na contratação pública.

Detecting violation of business constraints in declarative process execution: a case study

PurposeDeclarative process modelling is a constraint-centric approach that treats business rules as first-class citizens in business process models. Augmenting the declarative process modelling technique with capability to detect the constraint violations during business process execution is of crucial importance. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the modelling of business rules through a repository of pattern-oriented templates.Design/methodology/approachThe semantics of the business rule templates is underpinned by linear temporal logic (LTL). Automated temporal reasoning is then conducted for determining whether process executions adhere to the business rules through the utilisation of the Logics Workbench (LWB). An application of the methodological framework is illustrated by a realistic case study on degree requirements verification.FindingsTo access the practicality of the approach, the case study of this paper is based on the verification of degree requirements, which is different from the domain area of the case study in the author’s prior work. The findings indicated that the temporal framework could be applied to the declarative process modelling in a consistent and efficient manner.Originality/valueThis paper is an extended version of the author’s earlier study. More details on the LTL and LWB are provided in the current study. The author introduces 17 new business rule templates and illustrates the utilisation of the new templates via a case study that belongs to a different domain area.

Guidelines for Business Rule Modeling Decisions

ABSTRACTBusiness process models are used heavily in practice as a basis for process improvement, systems development, and understanding business operations. While prior research has identified a clear need for integrating business rules into graphical business process models, there is little guidance on the circumstances under which business rules should be integrated into business process models. Unnecessary integration may hamper business rule reuse, increase business process model complexity, and lead to difficulties with business rule modification, to name a few. Accordingly, it is important to understand when such integration is appropriate. The aim of this article is to address this need for guidance on when business rules should be integrated in process models, and when they should remain separate. To this end, we explain 12 factors posited to influence such modeling decisions, conduct an empirical study to identify their importance, and develop empirically based modeling guidelines that inform business rule modeling decisions.

Business Rules Model for the Automation in the Receipt of Credit Applications by Financial Institutions based on ArchiMate

Through different viewpoints exposed by an ArchiMate Business Architecture Model, a high level of business abstraction is achieved in the development phase of a software system. This allows to carry out the automation of business rules for payroll loan products placement within the receipt of credit applications. Currently the flexibility of information systems plays a key role as a strategy in the decision-making process in financial institutions. This is because they require a timely response to the changing market demand for products and services for financial consumers. Given the above, information technology management in organizations faces the ongoing challenge of developing software solutions that meet the needs of internal and external customers. This is done by using recurring architectural models that provide safety, maintainability and scalability. In order to make this possible, a business rules automation model that dissociates the business logic from the business rules facilitates, subsequently, a possible change in the proposed rules. In this paper, the architecture of the software system is based on five viewpoints offered by the ArchiMate modeling, which was carried out with the modeling tool Coloso.

A MDSD Approach for Adaptable Service Oriented Systems based on Domain Specific Language Engineering

The simultaneous use of the new computing paradigms: Domain Specific Modeling, Context Oriented Computing and Service Oriented Computing, raises many challenges. Particularly, the challenge of engineering such systems, which consists of the definition of modeling approaches, processes, techniques and tools to facilitate their construction. The proposed MDSD approach for context-aware service oriented systems is based on Domain Specific Language Engineering. The Context-Aware, Domain Specific and Service Oriented (CADSSO) development approach is based on five models. The first one is domain specific context model; it symbolizes the services context of use. The second is domain specific services model; it takes care of services modeling. The third is service variability model; it formulates services variants. The fourth is adaptation rules model, which is the joint between service variability model and context model. The fifth is business rules model, used to model domain business. A code generator is in charge of the transformation of the five models to the final code.

Lightweight formalization and validation of ORM models

ORM (Object Role Modeling) is a rich and popular conceptual modeling method. ORM has been used for data modeling, ontology engineering, modeling business rules, XML-Schemes and data warehouses, requirements engineering and web forms. Automated reasoning like satisfiability testing allows developers to detect modeling mistakes in the early stages of development. In this paper we propose a lightweight formalization of the ORM meta-model in Alloy. Using this meta-model as a toolkit one can easily specify ORM models in Alloy and verify various properties on them using the Alloy Analyzer. In order to achieve scalability, we use the cardinality of concepts to model their population. This increases the scalability of the approach dramatically. To show an application of the meta-model we formalize some unsatisfiability patterns and check them on the Alloy representation of the ORM model.

Formalizace základních podnikových znalostí a Unified Modeling Language

The most important priority in our knowledge driven society is the identification of improvement areas and utilization of information and communication technologies. Business knowledge is considerable resource of business competition advantage. The organisations have huge amount of data and using them with the connecting of people factor (knowledge and skill) is a big challenge for all business skateholders. Mainly my diagrams brings to this area an orderliness and recommended structure.The article deals with several UML class diagrams, which are used for business concepts modeling, especially for business resources, business events and business rules modeling. These concepts are the business concepts in which may be the knowledge stored in particular. The diagrams simplify the knowledge artefacts, clarify the knowledge content and formalize knowledge structure. It is presented some views at business concepts, business actors and their role, business events and contracts and business document and its distribution in structured form, which is graphical and understandable for everybody in business.

Issues and Challenges of Business Rules Modeling in Software Systems for Business Management

Software systems for business management appeared as a result of the growing need to ensure a consistent IT support for most of the business activities that organizations have to deal with. Moreover, organizations continue to struggle for obtaining competitive advantages on the business market and to lower the cost of developing and maintaining computer systems to support their operations. As business rules play an important role within any organization, they should be taken into consideration as distinct elements when developing a software system that will operate in a collaborative environment. The paper addresses the problem of business rules modeling, with special emphasis on incorporating business rules in Unified Modeling Language (UML) models.Keywords: Business Rules, Software Systems, Business Management, UML Models, OCL1IntroductionWhile software development environ- ments productivity is still growing strong, studies on the causes of software projects failure consistently places poor quality re- quirements on top of the hierarchy of these causes [1]. An explanation of this situation is that the development teams allocated too lit- tle time understanding the real business prob- lems, the user needs or the nature of the un- derlying environment in which the system will run. Moreover, developers are trying to provide technical solutions as quickly, but based on insufficient understanding of the problem's requirements [2].In most cases, difficulties in requirements modeling and analysis arise from insufficient understanding of the logic part of the applica- tion, known as business logic. Business logic is the defining element for a business being in the process of modeling and automation, and it includes both business rules (BR) and workflow (process), which describes the transfer of documents or data from one par- ticipant (person or software system) to an- other.It is common knowledge that every organiza- tion operates according to a set o business rules. These may be external rules, coming from legal regulations that must be observed by all organizations acting in a certain field, or internal rules which define the organiza- tion's business politics and aim to ensure competitive advantages in the market. Start- ing from the previous observations, it is ob- vious the important role that business rules play within the development process of an organization's software system [3]. And this especially applies to Software Systems for Business Management (SSBM), as they are suitable to incorporate a large amount of business rules.Doing business today is mainly about creat- ing and maintaining strategies and connec- tions. While strategies must comply with business rules, an organization is more likely to succeed in its business activities if it cre- ates a support for strong collaborations be- tween managers, employees, clients and any other stakeholders. Thus, using a collabora- tive SSBM is a must, not a need in order to operate in a collaborative environment.An analysis of SSBM's components, in terms of their functionality and how they relate to business rules reveals the important role that the business rules play in the development process of these systems. The results of this analysis are summarized in Figure 1 and de- scribe hereinafter.Very often, software components are dis- cussed in the context of component-based software systems. In this paper a software component will be perceived in a wider sense, as an element of the system which provides implementation for a service or pre- defined event, being encapsulated and able to communicate with other system components.According to [4], a software application may contain two types of components: Technical components and Business components. Technical components are non-functional components used to build the technical archi- tecture by providing reliable and reusable so- lutions that have a recurring problem (ensur- ing, for example, networks communication or persistence). …

콘텐츠 제작을 위한 소프트웨어 디자인 프레임워크

최근에는 터치형 단말기에서 소비되는 어플리케이션 형태의 콘텐츠 제작을 지원하는 소프트웨어가 다양하게 등장하고 있는데 이러한 콘텐츠 제작 기반의 소프트웨어는 기존의 사용자 태스크와 다른 형태를 갖는다. 사용자 인터랙션을 고려하는 시점이 콘텐츠 제작과 소비, 양 측면에서 모두 중요한 역할을 담당하기 때문이다. 이러한 변화의 흐름 가운데 본 논문은 태스크 모델링에 기반을 둔 모델 기반 유저 인터페이스 개발(Model Based User Interface Design, MB-UID)과 사용 중심 디자인(Usage Centered Design, UCD) 모델을 기반으로 콘텐츠 제작 소프트웨어 유저 인터페이스 디자인 프레임워크를 새롭게 제시한다. 본 프레임워크는 비즈니스 규칙 모델, 제작 역할 모델, 제작 흐름 모델, 제작 행동모델, 표현 모델의 다섯 단계로 구성된다. 본 연구를 통해 콘텐츠 제작시 사용자와 소프트웨어 간의 인터랙션을 효율적으로 통제함과 동시에 콘텐츠 소비시 발생 가능한 사용자 인터랙션 유형을 콘텐츠 제작 단계에서 미리 고려할 수 있다. Nowadays, the various kind of software packages that support content creation consumed in touch-type terminals as an application have come into the market. These softwares have a different style of user task compare to existing user task. The reason why difference style has been appeared for now is because interaction timing has a important role of both content creation and consumption. For this reason, in this paper, we propose a software UI design framework for content creation using MB-UID and UCD model based on task modeling. The proposed framework is made up of five steps: business rule model, creation role model, creation flow model, creation action model, presentation model. Through this framework, we handle the interaction between a content creator and software user interface at the content creation phase. At the same time, we consider a possible interaction type which can occur by consumers at the consumption phase in advance.

Research on Regression Testing Methods for Industry Applications

This research discusses the problems about scope accuracy and quality control in application of regression testing in the engineering practice, and proposes a practical regression method, combing with change-impact-analysis, business rules model, cost risk assessment and test case management. This approach has already been applied to functionality testing of some core systems in our domestic financial institutions, and made great achievement.

Comparative analysis of business rules and business process modeling languages

During developing an information system is important to create clear models and choose suitable modeling languages. The article analyzes the SRML, SBVR, PRR, SWRL, OCL rules specifying language and UML, DFD, CPN, EPC and IDEF3 BPMN business process modeling language. The article presents business rules and business process modeling languages theoretical comparison. The article according to selected modeling aspects of the comparison between different business process modeling languages ​​and business rules representation languages sets. Also, it is selected the best fit of language set for three layer framework for business rule based software modeling.

Application of ontologies to traceability in the dairy supply chain

Systems for tracking products through supply chains range from paper-based records maintained by producers, processors, and suppliers to sophisticated ICT-based solutions. In addition to supporting product traceability, ICTs may also support data capture, recording, storage, and sharing of traceability attributes on processing, genetics, inputs, disease/pest tracking and measurement of environmental variables. A key success factor for a traceability system is the capability to integrate and share information along the supply chain. ICT represents a tool to overcome integration problems, data fusion and information dissemination. In this paper we illustrate the application of ontology as a tool to model business processes and rules within an agri- food chain. The business case is represented by the Bovlac project: a scientific and technologic platform to trace fresh cheese production.

Extending BPMN Business Process Model with SBVR Business Vocabulary and Rules

Despite the fact that business process (BP) modeling has its long-lasting traditions in various areas of application, this discipline remains in the constant process of improvement and issue-solving. The possibilities of synergy among business process models and business vocabularies & rules are analyzed in this paper. The authors emphasize the existing gap between business process modeling and specification of business vocabularies & rules. Such situation may lead to misunderstandings while reading and interpreting business models and also miscommunication issues within among the organizations. Some of these issues could be resolved by realizing the integration of BP modeling standards with business vocabularies & rules. The paper presents some argumentation to back such statements. Later, basic principles of the approach for BPMN Business process model integration with SBVR business vocabulary & rules are presented and briefly described in this paper. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.41.4.2013

A standard language for service delivery: Enabling understanding among stakeholders

In Integrated Service Delivery (ISD), multiple service providers have to collaborate in order to serve as a one-stop shop for their clients. Although technical standards have been met, collaboration is difficult. Service providers do not know what kind of information other providers need, are not aware of each other's processes or simply do not understand each other due to the use of ambiguous terms. In this paper, foundations for a language are developed to specify the requirements for ISD and enable the unambiguous understanding of these requirements. A combination of the standards Object-Role Modeling (ORM) and Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is used to ensure human readability and to have the full expressive power of formal languages. Composed expressions are developed to express logical, temporal, and geographical requirements. This enables service providers to understand how, when, and where services need to be integrated. By utilizing these foundations to generate a standard language for ISD, service providers can collaborate and they can understand complex client requirements which lead to improved ISD.

Business Rules Modeling for Business Process Events: An Oracle Prototype

Business rules guide business process activities and events, besides impacting associated business entity types. This paper outlines an approach to model business rules associated with business process events through traditional data modeling techniques like entity-relationship diagrams, and then transform the data model into application procedures that can effect business process events. A prototype to model a sample set of business rules pertaining to a business process event into a relational database is provided to demonstrate the application of the concept. The paper utilizes the Oracle database for illustrating the concepts. The prototype is explained through an application in Oracle's PL/SQL Server Pages.

Application of the Ontology Axioms for the Development of OCL Constraints from PAL Constraints

Nowadays, ontologies play a central role in many computer science problems such as data modelling, data exchange, integration of heterogeneous data and models or software reuse. Yet, if many methods of ontology based conceptual data modelling have been proposed, only few attempts have been made to ontology axioms based modelling of business rules, which make an integral part of each conceptual data model. In this paper, we present the approach how ontology axioms can be used for business rules implementation. Our proposal we apply for the transformation of PAL (Protege Axiom Language) constraints (ontology axioms), which is based on KIF (Knowledge Interchange Format) and is part of KIF ontology, into OCL (Object Constraint Language) constraints, which are part of a UML class diagram. Z language is used to formalise the proposal and describe the transformation. The Axiom2OCL plug-in is created for automation of the transformation and a case study is carried out.

Incorporating business logics into RFID-enabled applications

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology promises many benefits to business process automation with real-time context awareness and item level accuracy. Through readers to RFID middleware systems, the information and the movements of tagged objects can be used to trigger business transactions. With the aim to seamlessly incorporate RFID technology into business process automation, this paper investigates the deployment of business logics to RFID edge systems. A comprehensive framework is proposed to model business rules in an event-driven perspective on the basis of event calculus. This framework first elicits the business meaningful events from the large volume of raw RFID reads, and guides the behaviours and interactions of involved objects in response to the elicited events and the pre-defined business rules. The execution and functional invocations are enforced with RFID queries, where a two-block buffering mechanism is proposed to handle the identified delayed effects and thereby improve the RFID query efficiency. Experiments and analysis are conducted to discuss the query efficiency improvements and the scalability to more complex applications.

A Logical Approach for Implementing Dynamic Business Rules

Business Rules are operational rules based on data that business organizations follow to perform various activities. Regarding problem domains in the organization, business rules (BR) are classified into two groups: Static and Dynamic. A static business rule is a constraint (integrity) or derivation rule that applies to each individual state of the business, taken one state at a time. Dynamic Business Rules (DBR) are concerned with the invocation of actions in response to events. Although a lot of modeling languages and approaches for business rules modeling and different technologies and tools for business rules implementation have been proposed by researchers and practitioners in the past ten years, there is no consensus yet on technology standard and logical relationship between the modeling and the implementation of the proposed methods. The purpose of this paper is to implement DBR based on our proposed modeling methodology. In this study, DBR System architecture is developed using Java and Prolog+CG, a CG-based logic programming language which integrates Prolog, the manipulation of conceptual graphs, Java and object-oriented constructs. The advantages of our system are demonstrated with the case study of the Locomotive Maintenance’s Business (Rules). Keywords: Business Rules Approach, Dynamic Business Rules (DBR), Conceptual Graphs (CG), Mineau’s Approach, Prolog+CG

Entity relationship modelling of business rules: an Oracle prototype

Business rules are generally developed as an addendum to database development using proprietary techniques. This paper provides an approach to apply the techniques of traditional entity-relationship modelling to structure the business rules as a rule repository for interaction with transactional entity types in a relational database management system. A prototype to model a sample set of business rules into relational database is provided to demonstrate the application of the concept. The paper utilises the Oracle database for illustrating the concepts. The prototype is explained through an application in Oracle's PL/SQL server pages.