=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1920/paper4
|storemode=property
|title=Business Capability-centric Management of Services and Process Models
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1920/paper4.pdf
|volume=Vol-1920
|authors=Wassim Derguech
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/bpm/Derguech17
}}
==Business Capability-centric Management of Services and Process Models==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1920/paper4.pdf
Business Capability-centric Management of
Services and Process Models
(Extended Abstract)
Wassim Derguech
Insight Centre for Data Analytics - National University of Ireland, Galway
wassim.derguech@insight-centre.org
Abstract. This research details a concept model for describing the busi-
ness capability of services and business processes from a functional per-
spective in terms of actions together with related business properties.
Furthermore, this work proposes the aggregation, indexing, discovery
and design of configurable models for services and business processes
using the concept of business capability.
Keywords: Business Capability, Services, Business Process, Aggrega-
tion, Indexing, Discovery, Configuration
1 Introduction
With the advent of Industry 4.0, more and more companies are actively work-
ing 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, configuration, etc. more
challenging. Thus, properly digitising those assets needs a proper data model to
describe them, and proper algorithms for indexing, discovery and configuration.
In this context, this research proposes a concept model for describing the
business capability of services and business processes from a functional perspec-
tive in terms of what do they achieve together with related business properties
[7, 1]. Furthermore, this work proposes the aggregation [6], indexing and discov-
ery [8], and design of configurable 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 specific 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 configurable process models. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper
and discusses future research directions.
2 Towards a Structured Business Capability Description
The first 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 on-
tologies 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 in-
terfaces. 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 definition, I consider a business capability as a set of actions
enriched with zero or many properties. Properties allow to refine further the
action that is taken for a domain related ontology. More formally, as shown in
Fig. 1, in the proposed model capabilities are defined as an Action Category and
a set of property entries. The Action Category concept is similar to an action
verb [14] that defines, in a natural language, what is the action being described.
Different 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 specific property that is present in all busi-
ness capability descriptions via the property achieves (See Fig. 1). A property
entry, defined with respect to certain declaration, is a couple (property, value)
where property is a domain-specific functional feature or a domain-independent
non-functional property and value is the value or the possible values that a prop-
erty 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.
1..* achieves
Action Category Capability
specifies extends
properties
0..*
definedW.R.T
Property value 1
Property Entry Value
Declaration 1 0..*
PropertyName : String PropertyName : String
SpecRelation : Set Configurable: Boolean
Fig. 1. Business Capability UML Class Diagram
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.
3 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 gener-
ates 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 firing one node at a time.
Each node introduced new changes to the propagated capability. The algorithm
is formally verified with formal semantics using Petri Nets [15] and implemented
in a tool to support the validation by interviewing domain experts. The experts
find 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 efficient indexing and discovery of business ca-
pabilities 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
classification tool. Using FCA has the advantage of benefiting 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 first experiment, a set of real-
world 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 different configurations. Results of the evaluations
show that the approach is effective and performs better than related approaches
as shown in Table 1.
5 Using Business Capabilities in the Design of
Configurable Business Process Models
The fourth objective of this research is to reduce the business process modelling
effort when using configurable process models by proposing an algorithm for
creating business capability-annotated configurable business process models that
capture configuration options in terms of business capability features.
After the analysis of reuse-oriented business process modelling techniques in
order to find how capabilities were used and how can the business capability
Table 1. Comparing Time Performances of Indexing Approaches
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
size: 50 services, index construction + advertisement
Reasoning-based matchmaking [18]
time: ∼ 4 s
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 configuration-based modelling
was a suitable starting point. The idea is to start from a reference process model
[16] (called a configurable model) and tailor this model to meet the end-user
needs by enabling or disabling several branches of the model.
The current state of configurable model requires an extensive process mod-
elling techniques to carry out proper configurations (captured in terms of model
restrictions and parameters) or extensive manual effort for creating an abstract
configuration layer [12] that reflect 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 config-
urable models that capture configuration options from a functional perspective
(capabilities parameters) in order to shift the configuration from manipulating
the model directly to manipulating the parameters of its capabilities. My pro-
posed solution [5] has been tested on real world business process models from
municipalities (used in existing case study [10]) and customs clearance proce-
dures. 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 simplifies the understand-
ing of configuration options and the impact of configuration 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 capabil-
ity conceptual model for describing the action performed by services and process
models, (ii) an algorithm for the aggregation of business capabilities that is com-
parable to process abstraction techniques, (iii) the validation of the applicability
of formal concept analysis for the efficient indexing and discovery of capabilities
and (iv) an algorithm for automatically creating a capability-annotated con-
figurable process model by merging a set of process variants. Further research
directions can be explored for each of these contributions that have beend dis-
cussed in details in my thesis [4].
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