Quality Of Business Process Models Research Articles

ALGORITHM FOR COMPREHENSIBILITY EVALUATION OF BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS USING NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

This research paper is devoted to solving the problem of assessing the quality of business process models, in particular, evaluating the comprehensibility of text labels in these models. The purpose of the work is to increase the understandability of text labels in business process models to improve the overall quality of these models. This problem is relevant, since poorly understandable business process models may cause errors when described workflows are executed, or when they are analyzed for process improvement. Moreover, such errors may decrease the performance of business processes if involved parties misunderstand required tasks and lead to monetary losses or even more dangerous consequences for critical business processes. Thus, to achieve the goal, it is necessary to create an algorithmic solution to solve the specified problem. In this work, the issues that existing studies did not resolve or did not reveal properly, and the main shortcomings of the existing software solutions that should solve the problem mentioned above are identified. The proposed algorithm is based on the natural language processing techniques, such as tokenization and part of speech tagging. The proposed algorithm considers the recommended “verb-object” labeling style of activity text labels in business process models. The comprehensibility of a sample business process model is evaluated using the Python implementation of the proposed algorithmic solution. Obtained results are discussed, a conclusion is made, and future research directions are formulated.

A SOFTWARE TOOL FOR QUALITY MEASUREMENT OF BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS USING DISTANCES IN N-DIMENSIONAL SPACE

This paper considers the problem of quality measurement of business process models using the n-dimensional space distances. Business process models are graphical schemes similar to flowcharts or activity diagrams utilized in software engineering, usually represented using the BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) or EPC (Event-driven Process Chain) notations. Business process modeling aims to capture current enterprise workflows for their analysis and then improvement using automation through IT (Information Technology) systems deployment. Therefore, designed business process models should be of high quality, so all “weak spots” of described organizational workflows could be properly identified and replaced with more efficient solutions. Whereas process models, which are not understandable, un-structured, and/or uncertain, may cause even more issues when used to improve organizational activities. Therefore, this study proposes quality measures and a software tool that can be used to detect errors in BPMN and EPC business process models using distances in n-dimensional space. The formal problem statement based on the graph-based description of business process models was given. Business process model quality characteristics and measures that consider features of both BPMN and EPC notations were proposed. Distances in n-dimensional space were suggested for usage to measure the quality of business process models. The algorithm for business process model quality measurement was proposed. The software tool to measure the quality of BPMN and EPC business process models was designed and developed. The quality of sample business process models was measured using the software tool. Obtained results were analyzed and discussed. This paper considers the Euclidean distance only, while other existing n-dimensional space distance measures or, on the opposite, similarity measures, can be used to evaluate business process model quality in further research.

A prototype for continuous improvement of processes and their results in the field of higher education

PurposeThe concept of business process (BP) management plays a major role in information systems with several applications. Modeling languages and tools can be used by domain experts to help in the business process model (BPM) design. The purpose of this paper is to focus on quality improvement for BPMs through the proposition of a novel prototype and apply it on real case for BPMs in the field of higher education.Design/methodology/approachThe authors developed a prototype named Business Process Model Quality Assess (BPMoQualAssess) that works in two steps. In the first step, it allows designing and verifying the quality of BPMs in the field of higher education. Second, it focuses on evaluating process results through a set of criteria and specific measures for each process. Both steps are based on three main key concepts: measures, threshold values and guidelines in order to guide the modeler in assessing his/her model and also to get good results from the latter.FindingsThe authors implemented the BPMoQualAssess prototype to evaluate the quality of BPMs as well as its results. Furthermore, the authors have conducted a case study with a process in the field of higher education. Indeed, first, the authors obtained an improved BPM with a high-quality level. Second, the authors then evaluated the results by focusing on measures, threshold values and appropriate quality guidelines in order to obtain better results.Originality/valueIn the context of this study, the authors aim to make a significant contribution to the knowledge on the subject of the quality for higher education sector processes, on one hand on the models and on the other hand the results of processes. All these concepts are fully nested within a new quality prototype for process model evaluation and validated on real BPMs in the field of higher education. There are many publications focusing on BP quality in the literature, but only a few approaches combine the main keys thresholds, measures and guidelines. In fact, the principal contribution of this research consists in linking measures and threshold values to the resulting guidelines as they have been presented separately in the literature. Furthermore, the authors elaborate for each measure its own recommendation to guide the modeler in redesigning his/her model. Also, the authors define threshold values of process results in higher education and also took into account the opinion of domain experts. To sum up, the originality of this work appears in the application of BPM in the field of higher education given the lack of work in the literature for this direction, and it will pave a way for research in BP innovation areas.

For a Better Assessment of Business Process Quality

The consistent qualitative assessment, after each applied change, aims not only to analyze the improvement or degradation of the quality of business processes but also to quantify the change impact on the QoS (Quality of Service) behavior. Our work, in this paper, is focused on the change management to assess the qualitative characteristics of business processes. In this respect, a variety of attributes and metrics have recently been proposed to assess the characteristics of the quality of business process models. We propose an overall quality approach which uses a relevant set of business process quality dimensions, characteristics, and metrics. It also proposes to use threshold values in order to evaluate the measurement results. It may facilitate the decision making during the business process evolution and may also help to maintain the high level of service quality.

Determining The Threshold Values Of Quality Metrics In BPMN Process Models Using Data Mining Techniques

The quality assessment of business process models based on the use of quality metrics is important and several questions arise regarding their threshold values.The goal of our research is to determine the threshold values for quality metrics to help modelers evaluate the quality of business process models. Then, the influence of the application domain on the threshold values in the quality metrics of the BPMN models is determined.For this purpose, we collected a set of good quality BPMN business process models from various sources. The calculation of quality metrics for this set of models is obtained automatically by adopting and extending a plugin developed in Java. Then, for determining the threshold values Data Mining is adopted. More precisely, we applied the clustering algorithm. To validate our results, we compared the threshold values found through our approach with the threshold values already published in literature. Moreover, we observed that the threshold values change according to the field of application. Thus, we applied the clustering algorithm separately for each domain, to find the threshold values classified by application domain.

Improving the quality of Business Process Models: Lesson learned from the State of the Art

Purpose The quality of a Business Process (BP) model is vital for the successful accomplishment of all its lifecycle phases. Indeed, a high-quality BP model makes its implementation, execution and evaluation easier. In the literature, the improvement of BP model quality has been dealt with using several techniques. For instance, modeling guidelines, refactoring techniques, and transformation rules are the most used ones. The purpose of this paper is to exploit existing initiatives in this field to help designers improve their BP models. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws up a systematic inventory of the existing approaches to improve the quality of BP models. Moreover, it provides a comparative evaluation with the aim of identifying the particularities of each approach as well as the common gaps in the state of the art. Finally, it proposes a guiding framework, called BP-Quality, that supports designers in improving the quality of their BP models. Findings The usability of BP-Quality is illustrated through a case study and a set of experiments. The preliminary experimental evaluation of this guiding framework shows encouraging results. Originality/value The proposed guiding framework has the merit of exploiting existing initiatives in the field of BP quality improvement. In addition, it customizes and optimizes the quality improvement process according to the particularities of each BP model.

Improvement of Quality for Business Process Modeling Driven by Guidelines

The improvement of quality in business process models should be objective by applying measures. However, an evaluation of measurement results is not a simple task. It also requires the identification of relevant threshold values and indicators, which make it possible to distinguish between different levels of quality for BP models. In this context, a prototype named BPMoQualAssess (Business Process Model Quality Assess) is described. This prototype is including useful metrics defining the syntactic aspect of BP models also their threshold values. The obtained results are guidelines containing recommendations that aim at improving an input model by modifying it in order to obtain a higher level of quality.

B-BabelNet: Business-Specific Lexical Database for Improving Semantic Analysis of Business Process Models

Similarity calculation between business process models has an important role in managing repository of business process model. One of its uses is to facilitate the searching process of models in the repository. Business process similarity is closely related to semantic string similarity. Semantic string similarity is usually performed by utilizing a lexical database such as WordNet to find the semantic meaning of the word. The activity name of the business process uses terms that specifically related to the business field. However, most of the terms in business domain are not available in WordNet. This case would decrease the semantic analysis quality of business process model. Therefore, this study would try to improve semantic analysis of business process model. We present a new lexical database called B-BabelNet. B-BabelNet is a lexical database built by using the same method in BabelNet. We attempt to map the Wikipedia page to WordNet database but only focus on the word related to the domain of business. Also, to enrich the vocabulary in the business domain, we also use terms in the business-specific online dictionary (businessdictionary.com). We utilize this database to do word sense disambiguation process on business process model activity’s terms. The result from this study shows that the database can increase the accuracy of the word sense disambiguation process especially in particular terms related to the business and industrial domains.

Refactor Business Process Models with Maximized Parallelism

With the broad use of business process management technology, there are more and more business process models. Since the ability of different modelers is different, the quality of these models varies. A question arises here is that, can we refactor these models to improve the quality as practised in software engineering? Business process modeling can be regarded as declarative programming, and business process models can be used to drive the process aware information systems, which are generally developed with model driven architecture, so business process models are crucial for the efficiency of process aware information systems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach on how to systematically refactor business process models with parallel structures for sequence structures for the first time. More specifically, we analyze the real causal relations between business tasks based on data operation dependency analysis, and refactor business process models with process mining technology. After comprehensive model refactoring, parallel execution of business tasks can be maximized, so the efficiency of business processing can be improved, that is, the quality of business process models can be improved. Analysis and experiments show that our approach is effective and efficient.

Quality Criteria and Metrics for Business Process Models in Higher Education Domain: Case of a Tracking of Curriculum Offers Process

The quality of business processes has been recognized as an important factor for modeling success in several domains, especially in higher education.In fact, quality of business process model could be the object to various interpretations; it must be treated in the most objective way, by using measures.Consequently, this paper presents an overview of the criteria and measures for quantifying the various aspects of business process models quality by citing the concepts that have been used for defining quality software programs. After that, these measures have been applied to a real business process model related to the tracking of curriculum offer process more commonly named “habilitation process”.

Pragmatic Guidelines for Business Process Modeling

This document presents an overview of pragmatic guidelines for undertaking business process modeling tasks. These guidelines can support practitioners and non-experts in the difficult task of modeling business process models. In particular, the guidelines focus on obtaining high quality of business process models in terms of their quality as a model, i.e. as a representation of a certain reality. In other words, the guidelines do not say anything about the quality of business processes as operationalization of a certain business strategy: they do not make statement in terms of e.g. cost effectiveness, customer friendliness, … The guidelines presented in this paper focus on the quality of the model as a representation of a reality: is the representation correct w.r.t the reality, does it make a correct use of the symbols, is it understandable, … etc. A more detailed description of the different dimensions of model quality used in this paper can be found in [1]. The guidelines presented in this document have been derived from a systematic literature review [2] and are supplemented with other aspects the authors consider relevant in order to make the guidelines more useful (e.g., threshold values, action or example, description, and associated quality metrics). The guidelines have a wide applicability across various industries and business processes modeling tasks. They are aimed at students and practitioners who are new to the task of business process modeling.

An Approach to Assessing the Quality of Business Process Models Expressed in BPMN

Introduction: The quality of business process models is important in the area of model-based software development. To the best knowledge of the author there is no working practical model for quality assessment of BPMN 2.0 Process Diagrams, which measures the actual models and automatically interprets the measured values. Objectives: Propose a metamodel for assessing the quality of BPMN 2.0 process models and a working solution ‐ a model for quality assessment of process models in BPMN (called MAQ) and a tool that implements MAQ. Methods: The metamodel was built upon the information presented in ISO/IEC 25010 (2011) standard. The methodology of MAQ was driven by its essential elements. Quality characteristics were selected through a systematic literature review. Quality metrics were identified through a literature review restricted by questions that every relevant literature had to armatively answer. Quality metrics were implemented in the tool and quality criteria were proposed based on the interpretation of the results of measuring a repository of BPMN models. Finally, quality functions were proposed and the complete MAQ was implemented in the tool. Conclusions: MAQ was preliminary evaluated for usefulness through a survey-based experiment. The results showed that the model works in most cases and is needed in general.

Generating optimized configurable business process models in scenarios subject to uncertainty

ContextThe quality of business process models (i.e., software artifacts that capture the relations between the organizational units of a business) is essential for enhancing the management of business processes. However, such modeling is typically carried out manually. This is already challenging and time consuming when (1) input uncertainty exists, (2) activities are related, and (3) resource allocation has to be considered. When including optimization requirements regarding flexibility and robustness it becomes even more complicated potentially resulting into non-optimized models, errors, and lack of flexibility. ObjectiveTo facilitate the human work and to improve the resulting models in scenarios subject to uncertainty, we propose a software-supported approach for automatically creating configurable business process models from declarative specifications considering all the aforementioned requirements. MethodFirst, the scenario is modeled through a declarative language which allows the analysts to specify its variability and uncertainty. Thereafter, a set of optimized enactment plans (each one representing a potential execution alternative) are generated from such a model considering the input uncertainty. Finally, to deal with this uncertainty during run-time, a flexible configurable business process model is created from these plans. ResultsTo validate the proposed approach, we conduct a case study based on a real business which is subject to uncertainty. Results indicate that our approach improves the actual performance of the business and that the generated models support most of the uncertainty inherent to the business. ConclusionsThe proposed approach automatically selects the best part of the variability of a declarative specification. Unlike existing approaches, our approach considers input uncertainty, the optimization of multiple objective functions, as well as the resource and the control-flow perspectives. However, our approach also presents a few limitations: (1) it is focused on the control-flow and the data perspective is only partially addressed and (2) model attributes need to be estimated.

Ontology-based similarity applied to business process clustering

Reverse engineering of business process enables business process to be discovered and retrieved from existing information systems, which embed many business rules that are not available anywhere else. These techniques are especially useful when business process models are unavailable, outdated, or misaligned because of uncontrolled maintenance. Reverse engineering techniques obtain well-designed business processes, but these are often retrieved with harmful quality faults as a consequence of the abstraction. Clustering techniques are then applied to reduce these quality faults and improve the understandability and modifiability of business process models. Regrettably, the most challenging concern is how to determine the similarity between two business activities to be clustered. Formal ontologies help to represent the essential concepts and constraints of a universe of discourse and determine the similarity in accordance with the given ontology. This paper shows how to compute and use the ontology-based similarity within a clustering algorithm whose aim is to improve the quality of business process models previously obtained from legacy information systems by reverse engineering. The principal contribution of this paper is the usage of an ontology-based similarity function and its application to 43 business process models retrieved from four real-life information systems. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Metrics for evaluation of workflow models: An experiment for validation

Due to the dynamism of business, it is very important to support continuous improvement and automation of business processes. The Workflow Management Systems WMS is one of the most significant technologies for such automation. Likewise, the quality of business process models is essential to facilitate understandability and adaptability of models to the constant changes experienced by the processes they represent. Therefore, it is fundamental to have tools to choose from several modeling alternatives, the most appropriate to the business needs. It is also essential to have tools to measure the quality of these models. Therefore, we propose a set of metrics for measuring the quality of workflow models based on their adaptability and understandability. In addition, we introduce the results of the first practical validation of the metrics through a comparative experiment of two Workflow modeling languages: YAWL Vs UML Activity Diagrams 2.0.

Quality Marks, Metrics, and Measurement Procedures for Business Process Models

The availability of high-quality business process models is a central prerequisite for a successful process management. Nevertheless, in practice process models exhibit a large number of quality deficits, among them grammatical, content-related, and stylistic defects. In addition, there exist only very few approaches to determine the quality of business process models. In this paper, we present the 3QM-Framework, an analytical approach to systematically determine the quality of business process models. The 3QM-Framework makes three contributions: it provides quality marks, metrics, and measurement procedures to quantify the quality level as elements of a theoretically justified quality model. The applicability of the 3QM-Framework has been empirically evaluated in case studies. The results of a survey that was conducted among experts moreover attest its practical relevance.

Improving the quality of business process models through separation of generation tasks in collaborative modelling

We describe an experiment in which we test how the quality of collaboratively built IDEF0 and UML models is influenced by the collaboration process. Two collaborative modelling approaches were compared: a ‘free-form’ approach and an approach that singles out the concept elicitation phase by means of a specific ‘generation’ pattern. An error classification framework was used to compare the quality of the resulting models. We found that the semantic quality of UML models can be significantly improved by an explicitly separated generation task.

Understanding Quality in Process Modelling: Towards a Holistic Perspective

Quality is one of the main topics in current conceptual modelling research, as is the field of business process modelling. Yet, widely acknowledged academic contributions towards an understanding or measurement of business process model quality are limited at best. In this paper I argue that the development of methodical theories concerning the measurement or establishment of process model quality must be preceded by methodological elaborations on business process modelling. I further argue that existing epistemological foundations of process modelling are insufficient for describing all extrinsic and intrinsic traits of model quality. This in turn has led to a lack of holistic understanding of process modelling. Taking into account the inherent social and purpose-oriented character of process modelling in contemporary organizations I present a socio-pragmatic constructionist methodology of business process modelling and sketch out implications of this perspective towards an understanding of process model quality. I anticipate that, based on this research, theories can be developed that facilitate the evaluation of the ’goodness’ of a business process model.