In the software maintenance, business process models help practitioners understanding of the software, because it represents the organisational process in which software is embedded. BPMN (Business ...Process Modelling and Notation) is the standard notation for business process modelling. However, it is common for the BPMN diagrams to be outdated, which, among other possibilities, may be caused due to the lack of adequate knowledge of some practitioners about the notation. It is important to provide means to stimulate the evolution of these models and, consequently, to aid in the learning of BPMN notation. With this focus, the authors proposed and evaluated the e-VOL BPMN, a technique that supports the evolution and the learning of BPMN diagrams. In this evaluation, they compared e-VOL BPMN with the BPMN 2.0 Poster, an artefact used commonly to support BPMN notation in companies. Participants who used the e-VOL BPMN in a scenario of diagrams evolution presented more correct BPMN diagrams and had a higher learning perception of the notation. In addition, in a written exam on BPMN notation, participants who used e-VOL BPMN scored higher. From these results, they notice that e-VOL BPMN support both evolution and learning of BPMN diagrams.
Business Process Management (BPM) is perceived as the spanning discipline that largely integrates and completes what previous disciplines have achieved (Brocke and Rosemann, 2014). As such, its ...integrating activities focused on to discover, model, analyse, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes (Weske, 2012). All of these enables implementing performance measurements within the organization, which in effect can lead to decision making based on data rather than people's opinion.
Process models are structured representations of workflows in an organization that provide a powerful tool for facilitating communication and process redesign or improvement. Model comprehension is ...challenging for beginning modelers. This study scrutinizes the effect of token-animated process models on novice modelers’ comprehension in an experiment with 229 participants. The study is grounded in the theory of distributed cognition as well as other cognition theories. The results confirm the significant impact of token-animated models on comprehension. Several individual characteristics were found to be important as well. Given that the animations were well accepted, token animation can be considered a resourceful technique for pragmatic and educational purposes.
This article discusses topics in the field of business analysis, which is the basic element of the operation of modern organizations. The aim of this publication is to present and evaluate four ...selected tools for modeling business diagrams in BPMN notation. As part of the introduction to the topic, business processes were characterized, their analysis was defined, and the reader was introduced to the BPMN notation and the tested tools. The research methodology and its course were also defined. Then, the research was carried out in accordance with the adopted methodology. The conclusion of this work was the result of the research together with the analysis. Finally, the conducted experiments were summarized together with conclusions.
Microservices must be composed to provide users with complex and elaborated functionalities. It seems that the decentralized nature of microservices makes a choreography style more appropriate to ...achieve such cooperation, where lighter solutions based on asynchronous events are generally used. However, a microservice composition based on choreography distributes the flow logic of the composition among microservices making further analysis and updating difficult, i.e. there is not a big picture of the composition that facilitates these tasks. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is the OMG standard developed to represent Business Processes (BPs), being widely used to define the big picture of such compositions. However, BPMN is usually considered in orchestration-based solutions, and orchestration can be a drawback to achieve the decoupling pursued by a microservice architecture.
Defining a microservice composition approach that allows us to create a composition in a BPMN model, which facilitates further analysis for taking engineering decisions, and execute them through an event-based choreography to have a high degree of decoupling and independence among microservices.
We followed a research methodology for information systems that consists of a 5-step process: awareness of the problem, suggestion, development, evaluation, and conclusion.
We presented a microservice composition approach based on the choreography of BPMN fragments. On the one hand, we propose to describe the big picture of the composition with a BPMN model, providing a valuable mechanism to analyse it when engineering decisions need to be taken. On the other hand, this model is split into fragments in order to be executed through an event-based choreography form, providing the high degree of decoupling among microservices demanded in this type of architecture. This composition approach is supported by a microservice architecture defined to achieve that both descriptions of a composition (big picture and split one) coexist. A realization of this architecture in Java/Spring technology is also presented.
The evaluation that is done to our work allows us to conclude that the proposed approach for composing microservices is more efficient than solutions based on ad-hoc development.
IT-systems supporting business operations are a cornerstone of industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing. IT-systems must not be considered as an end in itself. The enterprise IT architecture must be ...aligned with the business goals and strategy. Current approaches for designing enterprise IT architectures provide little guidance for greenfield environments in which there are little given boundaries, such as operation procedures. In smart manufacturing this is challenging due to the complexity of the shop floor involving OT and IT. This paper addresses this gap by combining the TOGAF architecture development method with the manufacturing operations management standard IEC 62264. The paper explores this combination by the example of designing an enterprise IT architecture for the Fraunhofer battery manufacturing research line involving the TOGAF phases architecture vision, business architecture, information systems architecture and technology architecture for manufacturing.
In current times, Organizations implement Quality Management Systems in search of a greater degree of profitability as well as a continuous improvement in its structure. One of the tools that can be ...used is Business Process Management Notation (BPMN), since it allows to model, control and improve these systems processes.
The present project main goals are to apply the Business Process Management (BPM) methodology, more specifically, its notation (BPMN) in the modulation of the Food Safety procedures; to streamline the Food Safety process control through the application of a programming system; and to demonstrate that an individual with no training in computer science can model processes using the tool aforementioned.
The results show that this notation is a potential asset to improve and simplify the function of every employee involved in the Food Safety process.
The Internet of Things enables to connect the physical world to digital business processes (BP) and allows a BP to (1) consider real-world data to take more informed business decisions, (2) automate ...and/or improve BP tasks, and (3) adapt itself to the physical execution environment. We refer to these processes as IoT-enhanced BPs. Although numerous researchers have studied this subject, there are still some challenges to be faced. For instance, the need of a modelling solution that does not increase the notation complexity to facilitate further analysis and engineering decision making, or an execution approach that provides a high degree of independence between the process and the underlying IoT device technology. The objective of this work is defining an approach that (1) considers important intrinsic characteristics of IoT-enhanced BPs at modelling level without growing the complexity of the modelling language, and (2) facilitates the execution of the IoT-enhanced BPs represented in models independently from IoT devices’ technology. To do so, we present a modelling approach that uses standard BPMN concepts to model IoT-enhanced BPs without modifying its metamodel. It applies the Separation of Concern (SoC) design principle: BPMN is used to describe IoT-enhanced BPs while low-level real-world data is captured in an ontology. Finally, a microservice architecture is proposed to execute BPMN models and facilitate its integration with the physical world. This architecture provides high flexibility to support multiples IoT device technologies as well as their evolution and maintenance. The evaluation done allows us to conclude that the application of the SoC principle using BPMN and ontologies facilitates the definition of intrinsic characteristics of IoT-enhanced BPs without increasing the complexity of the BPMN metamodel. Besides, the proposed microservice architecture provides a high degree of decoupling between the created models and the underlying IoT technology.
•A modelling approach based on BPMN and ontologies to model IoT-enhanced BPs.•Application of the SoC principle to not increase the complexity of models.•A microservice architecture to support the execution of IoT-enhanced BPs.
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