=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2575/paper3
|storemode=property
|title=Incorporating Organizational Aspects into Fragment-based Case Management
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2575/paper3.pdf
|volume=Vol-2575
|authors=Simon Remy
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/zeus/Remy20
}}
==Incorporating Organizational Aspects into Fragment-based Case Management==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2575/paper3.pdf
Incorporating Organizational Aspects into
Fragment-based Case Management
Simon Remy
Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
simon.remy@hpi.de
Abstract. Business process management (BPM) enables organizations
to model and analyze their business processes, for example, with the
help of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). Concerning
knowledge-intensive and flexible processes, recent research identified a
gap between implemented processes and modeled ones. To close this gap,
several approaches have been developed. One of them is fragment-based
case management (fCM). However, these approaches share a data-centric
view on processes. This work presents an approach to enrich process
fragments with organizational aspects. For this purpose, a meta-model
that describes the utilization of process participants in fragment-based
case management will be introduced. Further, it will be demonstrated
how to apply the approach to BPMN models to derive organizational
aware process fragments.
Keywords: Business Process Management · Fragment-based Case Man-
agement · Roles.
1 Introduction
As an interdisciplinary research field between computer science and business
administration, business process management (BPM) enables organizations to
design, administrate, configure, and analyze their processes [17]. Since the outcome
of most business processes is the result of the execution of subsequent activities,
BPM provides methods to analyze and to understand the relationships between
them [17]. One way to represent these relations and interactions are process
models using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. Among
others, BPMN provides basic elements to model activities, events, and control-
flow. Further, BPMN aims to close the gap between process modeling and
implementation [14]. Because of this, process models can also be executed using
process engines.
Lately, BPM has been applied in many different enterprises and industries.
However, it became clear that there exists a gap between some real-life business
processes and initially modeled ones. Many processes require a certain amount
of flexibility and are limited by traditional workflow management systems [3].
Especially knowledge-intensive processes are affected by this, like treatment
processes in healthcare. Those processes are rather unstructured compared to e.g.,
J. Manner, S. Haarmann, S. Kolb, O. Kopp (Eds.): 12th ZEUS Workshop, ZEUS 2020, Potsdam,
Germany, 20-21 February 2020, published at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2575
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Organizational Aspects in Fragment-based Case Management 11
a production process [6]. To better support knowledge-intensive processes, a new
paradigm was introduced, namely case handling or also called case management
[3, 11]. Based on this, other concepts like artifact centric models, Guard Stage
Milestone models (GSM), Adaptive Case Management (ACM), and Production
Case Management (PCM) were developed [5, 10, 12, 13].
These approaches have in common that they especially focus on the data
perspective. The states of data-objects indicate the state of a case and enable
knowledge-workers to make decisions about future steps in a case. However, none
of the approaches explicitly incorporate organizational perspectives, like roles.
In this paper, we will present a meta-model for process fragments, which can be
used in fragment-based Case Management (fCM), a specification of PCM. Besides
data objects, the model considers the organizational perspective of business
processes. Since knowledge-workers play an essential role in such processes, we
aim to provide a way to explicitly include them in the modeling process as well
as the relations between them. Further, we will demonstrate how a standard
BPMN model can be transformed into role-specific fragments.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we introduce
a running example, followed by related work in section 3. Section 4 presents a
meta-model to formally describe the usage of roles in process fragments and a
demonstration of deriving fragments from BPMN models based on it. Results,
limitations, and future work are discussed in section 5.
2 Running Example
Figure 1 depicts a sample BPMN process model. The model shows a simplified
treatment process of patients visiting the cardiology ward of a hospital. While
the patient is only modeled implicit via the activity labels, the model consists
of three lanes: nurse, physician, and both. While the BPMN standard does not
specify the usage of lanes [14], they are commonly used to assign activities to a
specific resource, in this example, roles.
Whenever a new patient enters the ward, a new process instance will be
instantiated. First, a nurse admits the patient, collects her medical history and
updates the patient’s record. Next, a blood sample is drawn from the patient.
This can either be done by the nurse or the physician, depending on who is
available. After that, both have to examine the patient together, followed by an
activity to prescribe a treatment by the physician. Before the process ends, the
nurse releases the patient and updates the patient’s record concurrently.
While executing activities, data objects will be read and written. Changes to
them are indicated by changes in the data objects’ state, e.g., after the patient
has been admitted the state of the Patient data object changes from init to
admitted. The state-space of each data object is defined by its lifecycle, which
is not part of the process model (see [11] for details). While data objects are
bound to specific process instances, they do not only persist information during
its lifetime but also define InputSets and OutputSets of activities. Those sets can
be seen as preconditions and postconditions of the respective activities. In other
12 Simon Remy
Fig. 1. Sample process that depicts the treatment process of patients in a cardiology
department of a hospital. Indicated by the lanes, participants of two roles are involved.
However, one activity requires participants of both roles to be executed.
words, an activity can be control-flow enabled, but not data-flow enabled. This
is the case if not all data objects in its InputSet are in the required state [11].
Even if the presented example depicts a simple process, and therefore the
use of fCM is limited, our findings can be applied to more complex models. We
will use the example to illustrate how to derive process fragments for business
processes based on roles according to the meta-model, described in section 4. For
the remainder, we lift the assumption, that only explicitly modeled roles, like
lanes in process models, will be considered.
3 Related Work
As described in the previous section, traditional process management approaches
are limited in their capability to support knowledge-intensive processes. To
overcome these limitations, several approaches have been proposed in the past.
As one of the first approaches case handling has been developed [3]. This ap-
proach not only focuses on the order of activities but mainly on data-objects. Since
then, several other ideas were introduced. Business artifact centric approaches
focus on the life-cycles of business objects to describe the context and structure
of processes [13]. GSM follows another data-driven approach using guards, stages,
and milestones to structure processes [5]. With the Case Management Model and
Notation (CMMN), a new modeling standard has been introduced to support case
management [15]. Process fragments were introduced by PCM to model small
parts of a process to maintain a certain degree of the structure without limiting
its flexibility too much [4, 11, 12]. Lastly, ACM aims to enable knowledge-worker
to adopt processes at run-time[10].
Organizational Aspects in Fragment-based Case Management 13
In their literature review, Hauder et al. identify several research questions for
ACM[8], where some can also be applied to the previously presented approaches.
According to their work, successful case management requires collaborations
between different roles and clear rules for interactions [9, 16]. Further, the
authors understand roles as a powerful tool to restrict data access and to ensure
data privacy [8]. One approach to model communication and interactions in
business processes is the Design & Engineering Methodology for Organizations
(DEMO) [7]. Other approaches are data-driven and based on historical process
data. They aim to model social networks from recorded process data. Those
networks visualize interactions between process participants and roles [1, 2].
4 Organizational Perspective on Process Fragments
To provide a formal basis, to discuss the usage of roles in fCM, we introduce a meta-
model for process fragments in the following. Further, we show an application of
the approach to derive fragments from BPMN process models.
4.1 Meta-Model
The meta-model, depicted in Figure 2, is based on the definition of process
models, presented in [17]. Process Fragment is the central class of the meta-model.
A fragment consists of Edges, Nodes, Data Objects, and Roles, where each edge
connects exactly two nodes. However, nodes can be connected to multiple edges.
Therefore edges express the control-flow relationship between nodes.
-exclusive
1
Process Fragment 1 .. * 1 .. *
Role 0 ..*
-to
-complementary
1
0 ..*
-to
1
1 .. * 1 .. * 0 .. *
Edge 1 .. * 2
Node 1 .. * 0 .. *
Data Object
Activity Event Gateway
Fig. 2. Meta-model for process fragments
Further, a Node can be an Activity, an Event, or a Gateway. In difference
to the process meta-model, a fragment can consist of a single activity. Since
fragments must not have empty start events, a fragment is considered as enabled
14 Simon Remy
if all preconditions of the first activity are fulfilled, in other words, as soon as it
is dataflow-enabled [11].
Data Objects play an essential role in fCM and are therefore included in the
meta-model. Multiple data objects can be associated with a set of nodes. However,
not every node has to be associated with a data object. Thus, a fragment does
not require data objects at all. While this seems to contradict the purpose of fCM,
it allows the process modeler, to design process fragments, which are enabled at
any time during the execution of an instance, like escalating the case to a higher
level, e.g. a manager.
Lastly, each process fragment is associated with at least one Role. Only
participants, who belong to the associated roles are able to execute instances of
the fragment. However, multiple roles can be associated with the same fragment.
In this case, roles can be either mutual exclusive to each other or complementary.
In the first case, only participants of one role can be involved during run-time,
while in the second case, participants of all roles have to participate in its
execution.
4.2 Application
The first step to derive fragments is to split the process model horizontally based
on each lane. As a result, activities in one lane will be disconnected whenever a
handover between two lanes takes place. Those disconnected activity sequences
are fragment candidates. However, fragments have to satisfy two conditions (i)
be free of open (X)OR-Joins/Splits, and (ii) no shared activities with any other
fragment. A join or split will be considered as open if its respective counterpart
is not part of the same fragment.
In order to satisfy the first condition, the control-flow of a candidate will be
cut before or after one of the respective gateways. In our running example, this is
the case for the activity draw blood in the upper lane.This activity also violates
the second condition, as it is part of an other fragment, that belongs to the
Physician. After all fragment candidates satisfy the first condition, they have to
be checked for shared activities. Depending on the control-flow structure, shared
activities need to be handled differently. In the simplest case, a shared activity
A is part of a sequence, without any exclusive and parallel gateways. In this
case, the sequence is split into two or three fragments, depending on the position
of A. If A belongs to a branch after an AND-Split, three scenarios, depending
on the total number of branches and on the number of branches A belongs to,
are possible. Given two branches, where A only belongs to one of them, a new
fragment is created for the branch, that contains activity A. The other branch
will be preserved as a sequence of the original fragment. If more branches exist
and A still belongs to only one branch, only the effected branch needs to be
removed, and a new fragment will be created. If activity A is part of multiple
branches, a new fragment for each of them will be created. Depending on the
number of not effected branches, the split can be preserved or not. Independent
of the applicable scenario, all newly created fragments might need to be split
up further in order to satisfy the second condition. Also, in order to keep the
Organizational Aspects in Fragment-based Case Management 15
semantic of the AND-join, its conditions need to be reflected in the data-flow.
Regarding the running example, the activity update patient data occurs in two
fragments, and the first described scenario applies. Since the control-flow is only
split into two concurrent branches, both will be transformed into a fragment.
Further, if activity A is part of an XOR/OR-Split, the following steps need
to be performed. All branches that contain A will be removed, and for each,
a new fragment will be created. If at least one branch does not contain A, a
new edge from the split node, to the join node will be inserted. Again, all newly
created fragments might need to be split up further in order to satisfy the second
condition. After all fragments have been derived and comply with both conditions,
the corresponding roles will be associated with the fragments. Since multiple
roles can be associated with one fragment, logical expressions are used to express
the relations between them. Roles, which are mutually exclusive to each other,
are joined by the ∨ operator, while complimentary roles are connected using the
∧ expression. Fragments that share the same set of roles, including the same
relations, are grouped as a collection.
Figure 3 depicts six fragments that are derived from the process model
presented in section 1. The graphical presentation of the fragments is loosely
based on the BPMN standard. Single fragments are modeled using core BPMN
elements, like activities, gateways, and events. The fragments are grouped based
on their associated role, which is located in the upper left corner. If one collection
is associated with multiple roles, all are listed, including their relation operator.
Fig. 3. Six fragments, derived from the BPMN model presented in section 1. The
fragments are organized in collections according to their associated roles and their
relations.
16 Simon Remy
5 Discussion and Future Work
In this paper, we introduced a novel approach on how to integrate roles into
process fragments to support fCM at design time. We presented a meta-model to
define the components and provided a brief example of how to derive process
fragments based on an existing process model.
Following this approach, adding new roles to an existing business process
can easily be done by introducing a new collection of fragments or by adding
role identifiers to existing ones, instead of editing a whole process model. Since
fragments are organized in role-specific collections, it is also easier to remove
them from the process. The compact representation provides a good overview
in which parts of the process a role is involved and, therefore, where deadlocks
or other inconsistencies may occur. This also goes along with better privacy
protection, since fragments clearly show interactions between roles and data
objects. In difference to BPMN, this approach provides a clear semantic of the
relationships between roles. While in BPMN the behavior of, shared lanes or
grouped activities, is not ultimately defined [14].
Like in BPMN, our approach does not specify any resource allocation method.
Hence it would be possible that different participants of the same role are involved
in different activities of the same fragment instance. Further, deriving process
fragments from BPMN models can be challenging, regarding the semantic of the
original control-flow. While the concurrent execution of multiple activities can be
easily modeled using the respective BPMN elements, this is more complex with
concurrent process fragments. The existing join condition has to be projected on
the data-flow, using dedicated input sets of the subsequent fragments.
In this paper, we investigated a model-driven perspective to derive process
fragments. In future work, we will explore a data-driven method based on event
logs. Further, we will evaluate our approach based on real-life event logs concerning
usability and interpretability.
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