Business Capability-centric Management of Services and Process Models (Extended Abstract)

Abstract

This research details a concept model for describing the business capability of services and business processes from a functional perspective in terms of actions together with related business properties. Furthermore, this work proposes the aggregation, indexing, discovery and design of con gurable models for services and business processes using the concept of business capability.

Keywords

• Business Capability
• Services
• Business Process
• Aggregation
• Indexing
• Discovery
• Con guration

Introduction

With the advent of Industry 4.0, more and more companies are actively working on digitising their assets (i.e., services, processes, etc.) for better control, collaboration, modularity, analysis, etc. By 2020 more than 80% of companies will have digitised their business processes and value chains. This creates more services and processes, making their indexing, discovery, con guration, etc. more challenging. Thus, properly digitising those assets needs a proper data model to describe them, and proper algorithms for indexing, discovery and con guration.

In this context, this research proposes a concept model for describing the business capability of services and business processes from a functional perspective in terms of what do they achieve together with related business properties [ 7, 1 ]. Furthermore, this work proposes the aggregation [ 6 ], indexing and discovery [ 8 ], and design of con gurable models [ 5 ] for services and business processes using the concept of business capability.

The remainder of this paper is organised as follows: Section 2 introduces the business capability meta-model used for designing domain speci c capabilities for the annotation of services and process tasks. Section 3 gives on overview of the capability aggregation algorithm proposed as part of this work. Section 4 investigates the use of Formal Concept Analysis for the indexing and discovery of business capabilities. Section 5 discussed the use of business capabilities in the design of con gurable process models. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper and discusses future research directions.

Towards a Structured Business Capability Description

The rst objective of this work is to propose a conceptual model for describing Business Capabilities [ 7, 1 ]. The proposed model is implemented as a set of ontologies that can be used for creating semantic annotations of business process models or services. In this work, I consider a business capability as standalone entity that can exist outside the scope of service descriptions or invocation interfaces. A service, a computer program, a business process or even a manual task can be described using the business capability concept.

In a very simple de nition, I consider a business capability as a set of actions enriched with zero or many properties. Properties allow to re ne further the action that is taken for a domain related ontology. More formally, as shown in Fig. 1, in the proposed model capabilities are de ned as an Action Category and a set of property entries. The Action Category concept is similar to an action verb [ 14 ] that de nes, in a natural language, what is the action being described. Di erent to the concept used by Oaks et al. [ 14 ], I consider the category as a concept from a domain related ontology that comes form a shared agreement on its semantics. A category is a speci c property that is present in all business capability descriptions via the property achieves (See Fig. 1). A property entry, de ned with respect to certain declaration, is a couple (property, value) where property is a domain-speci c functional feature or a domain-independent non-functional property and value is the value or the possible values that a property can have. Both property and value refer to ontological terms. For example, shipping services can be described using the action category \shipping" that can be extended with properties reporting on the \source address", \destination address" , etc.

Action Category 1..*achieves

Capability

Property

Declaration

PropertyName : String SpecRelation : Set<String> definedW.R.T 1 0..* specifies properties 0..* extends

Property Entry

PropertyName : String Configurable: Boolean value 1

Value

The model was validated via Bunge's theory of ontology [ 2 ] to verify its syntactic correctness: no constructs' redundancy and no semantic ambiguity. Interviews with domain experts show that the model is suitable for end-users understanding. However, tool supports are required for facilitating its adoption.

Aggregation of Business Capabilities: Determining the

Business Capability of a Process Model

The second objective of this research is to propose an abstraction technique that allows moving from an entire process model to its functional description by aggregating the business capabilities of the process elements into a single one. This feature is necessary when a user wants to have an overview of the capability of an entire business process model rather than a single activity.

In this context, the contribution is an algorithm that automatically generates the aggregated capability of an entire capability-annotated business process model [ 6 ]. It is a capability propagation algorithm that starts from the initial node of a process model and traverses the model by ring one node at a time. Each node introduced new changes to the propagated capability. The algorithm is formally veri ed with formal semantics using Petri Nets [ 15 ] and implemented in a tool to support the validation by interviewing domain experts. The experts nd that the approach is very well aligned with their expectations, the results of the aggregations are easy to interpret/understand and the tool support was simple and intuitive to use. 4

Indexing and Discovering Business Capabilities

The third objective of this work is to explore the use of Formal Concept Analysis [ 11 ] (FCA for short) for providing e cient indexing and discovery of business capabilities that are described using the proposed model [ 8 ]. Rather than inventing a new set of indexing and discovery algorithms, I reused FCA as a mathematical classi cation tool. Using FCA has the advantage of bene ting from already well established indexing and search algorithms that I have adopted for discovering a set of service descriptions (i.e., capabilities).

In the evaluation of this work [ 8 ], I used in a rst experiment, a set of realworld sensor services descriptions to validate its applicability in managing a reduced number of capabilities. In a second experiment, I used synthetic data set and measured the time required to create and traverse an index of a large number of capabilities with di erent con gurations. Results of the evaluations show that the approach is e ective and performs better than related approaches as shown in Table 1. 5

Using Business Capabilities in the Design of

Con gurable Business Process Models

The fourth objective of this research is to reduce the business process modelling e ort when using con gurable process models by proposing an algorithm for creating business capability-annotated con gurable business process models that capture con guration options in terms of business capability features.

After the analysis of reuse-oriented business process modelling techniques in order to nd how capabilities were used and how can the business capability

Indexing Mechanism Time Performance Inheritance between OWL-S services [ 3 ] N/A Topic extraction and Formal Concept size: 1088 services, query response time between 300 Analysis [ 13 ] and 3000 ms Reasoning-based matchmaking [ 18 ] tsiimzee::50 4sesrvices, index construction + advertisement Numerical encoding of ontological con- size: 100 services, index construction + advertisement cepts and codes comparison [ 17 ] time: 500 ms Capabilities Indexing using Formal Con- size: 1000 capabilities, index construction + parsing cept Analysis [ 8 ] time: 25 ms model contribute to this area [ 9 ], I found that con guration-based modelling was a suitable starting point. The idea is to start from a reference process model [ 16 ] (called a con gurable model) and tailor this model to meet the end-user needs by enabling or disabling several branches of the model.

The current state of con gurable model requires an extensive process modelling techniques to carry out proper con gurations (captured in terms of model restrictions and parameters) or extensive manual e ort for creating an abstract con guration layer [ 12 ] that re ect the business needs of the end-user.

I suggest in this work the early integration of business capability descriptions of activities in process models and proposed an algorithm for creating con gurable models that capture con guration options from a functional perspective (capabilities parameters) in order to shift the con guration from manipulating the model directly to manipulating the parameters of its capabilities. My proposed solution [ 5 ] has been tested on real world business process models from municipalities (used in existing case study [ 10 ]) and customs clearance procedures. Furthermore, I carried semi-structured interviews with domain experts to assess the usefulness of the proposed approach. Results show that the experts are familiar with reference models and the proposed work simpli es the understanding of con guration options and the impact of con guration decisions. However, the current state is not mature enough to be integrated in their systems. 6

Conclusion

The core contributions of this work can be summarised as follows: (1) a capability conceptual model for describing the action performed by services and process models, (ii) an algorithm for the aggregation of business capabilities that is comparable to process abstraction techniques, (iii) the validation of the applicability of formal concept analysis for the e cient indexing and discovery of capabilities and (iv) an algorithm for automatically creating a capability-annotated congurable process model by merging a set of process variants. Further research directions can be explored for each of these contributions that have beend discussed in details in my thesis [ 4 ].

References

[1] Sami Bhiri , Wassim Derguech, and Maciej Zaremba . Modelling Capabilities as Attribute-Featured Entities . In WEBIST 2012 , LNBIP. Springer, 2012 .

[2] M. Bunge . Treatise on Basic Philosophy. Ontology I: The Furniture of the World. Boston, Riedel , 1977 .

[3] Daniel Elenius et al. The OWL-S editor - A development tool for semantic web services . In ESWC 2005 , LNCS. Springer, 2005 .

[4] Wassim Derguech . Business Capability-centric Management of Services and Process Models . PhD thesis , NUI Galway, Ireland, Dec 2016 .

[5] Wassim Derguech and Sami Bhiri . An Automation Support for Creating Con gurable Process Models . In WISE 2011 , LNCS. Springer, 2011 .

[6] Wassim Derguech and Sami Bhiri . Business Process Model Overview: Determining the Capability of a Process Model Using Ontologies . In BIS 2013 , LNBIP. Springer, 2013 .

[7] Wassim Derguech and Sami Bhiri . Modelling, Interlinking and Discovering Capabilities . In IEEE AICCSA , 2013 .

[8] Wassim Derguech , Sami Bhiri, Souleiman Hasan, and Edward Curry . Using Formal Concept Analysis for Organizing and Discovering Sensor Capabilities . The Computer Journal , 58 ( 3 ): 356 { 367 , 2015 .

[9] Wassim Derguech , Sami Bhiri, and Edward Curry . Techniques for reuse in business process modeling in public administration . In Government 3 . 0 - Next Generation Government . 2017 (to appear).

[10] Florian Gottschalk et al. Con gurable process models: Experiences from a municipality case study . In CAiSE 2009 , LNCS. Springer, 2009 . doi: 10 .1007/978-3- 642 -02144-2 38 .

[11] Bernhard Ganter and Rudolf Wille . Formal concept analysis - mathematical foundations . Springer, 1999 .

[12] Marcello La Rosa . Managing Variability in Process-Aware Information Systems . PhD thesis , Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, April 2009 .

[13] Mustapha Aznag et al. Leveraging formal concept analysis with topic correlation for service clustering and discovery . In IEEE ICWS , 2014 .

[14] Phillipa Oaks , Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede , and David Edmond. Capabilities: Describing What Services Can Do . In ICSOC, LNCS . Springer, 2003 .

[15] James Lyle Peterson . Petri Net Theory and the Modeling of Systems . Prentice Hall PTR , 1981 .

[16] Michael Rosemann and Wil M. P. van der Aalst . A con gurable reference modelling language . Inf . Syst., 32 ( 1 ):1{ 23 , 2007 .

[17] Sonia Ben Mokhtar et al. EASY: E cient semAntic Service discoverY in pervasive computing environments with QoS and context support . Syst. and Soft ., 2008 .

[18] Naveen Srinivasan , Massimo Paolucci, and Katia Sycara . Adding OWL-S to UDDI, Implementation and Throughput . In SWSWPC 2004 , July 2004 .