=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-2673/paperDA7 |storemode=property |title=Business Process Composition. Planning with Constraints (Extended Abstract) |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2673/paperDA7.pdf |volume=Vol-2673 |authors=Piotr Wiśniewski |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/bpm/000320 }} ==Business Process Composition. Planning with Constraints (Extended Abstract)== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2673/paperDA7.pdf

Business Process Composition.
Planning with Constraints
(Extended Abstract)

Piotr Wiśniewski

AGH University of Science and Technology
al. A. Mickiewicza 30, 30-059 Krakow, Poland
wpiotr@agh.edu.pl

Keywords: business processes, BPMN, automated planning, constraint pro-
gramming, business process composition

1 Introduction
Modeling business processes is a way to describe organizational workflows which
aim to achieve required goals, understood as products or services delivered to
a final customer. Providing an understandable representation of a process helps
to establish a common link between technical and business people. This, in turn,
gives an opportunity to optimize the process structure. As a consequence, the
company may achieve its business objectives in a more efficient way.
It is proved that manually created process representations usually suffer from
various modeling errors, such as inconsistent connections or deadlocks [1]. Thus,
automating the modeling phase could be beneficial for obtaining process models
of higher quality and in a shorter time compared to manual modeling.
Business Process Composition refers to twenty Business Process Management
use cases proposed by van der Aalst [2], which were defined to classify the area
of research related to business processes. As there is no explicit use case related
to the automated generation of process models, the "Compose model" use case
has been considered. According to the cited paper, "Use case compose model
refers to the situation where different models are combined into a larger model ".
In the case of the proposed method, parts of the process specification may be
regarded as subprocesses or components of other models.
The concept of participatory process modeling consists in splitting the cre-
ation of the model among the participants of the process. The goal of this ap-
proach is to simplify and automate the task of collecting data and merging it into
a process model. In contrast to collaborative modeling (e.g., using an interactive
display board [3] or dedicated software on mobile devices [4]), the presented ap-
proach does not require the contributors to co-ordinate their actions. Figure 1
illustrates the difference between these two methodologies.
According to the main principle of the method proposed in the dissertation,
process participants are given a task to prepare descriptions of activities they are
responsible for. The specification of a process produced in such a way includes

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input and output parameters of each activity. The generated process model needs
to fulfill the data requirements, e.g. which data entities have to be available when
a process instance is completed. This goal may be achieved only by a limited
number of task sequences, not necessarily using all the activities included in the
original specification.

Collaborative Modeling
O

P1
P2

Participatory Modeling
O O
P1
P2

Timeline

Fig. 1: The difference between collaborative and participatory process modeling
(O – Process Owner, P – Process Participant).

The next step of the proposed methodology is related to Automated Plan-
ning, which is an area of research that aims to generate a chain of actions oriented
at achieving desired goals. A definition of a planning problem and its solution
is therefore closely related to Business Process Management, since a plan can
also represent a single instance of a particular workflow. However, every busi-
ness process can be executed in a limited number of ways, each of which refers to
a different process instance. The upper limit of this number depends on different
factors, such as the occurrence of specific events, resource availability, or other
external conditions. All of these aspects can be represented by particular pieces
of data and form a part of preconditions or effects for the executed activity. In
other words, an activity can be executed only if a given set of constraints is sat-
isfied. Thus, planning of a business process must be accompanied by constraints
that determine the conditions needed for every activity to be executed, as well
as the potential outcomes caused by this activity.

2 Scope of the Thesis and Research Results
The first part of the dissertation gives an overview of Business Process Man-
agement and its primary concepts, such as the BPM life cycle and modeling
notations. It also includes a review of state-of-the-art process model generation
techniques. Moreover, Automated Planning and main points of Constraint Pro-
gramming together with a review of Constraint Satisfaction Problems and their
applications were discussed.
The second part of the dissertation begins with a presentation of motiva-
tions and challenges related to business process composition. It also introduces
the concept of participatory process modeling, which is the main basis for the pro-
posed method. In addition, based on the existing solutions for the automated
generation of process models [5,6,7,8], a set of requirements and constraints
needed to generate a process model was collected.
As the next step, the algorithm for model composition was presented. The
method uses activity descriptions provided by stakeholders of the process. These
descriptions are then merged to obtain a declarative process specification, which
serves as an input to a constraint solver. The Constraint Satisfaction Problem
consists in finding a set of admissible workflow traces (execution plans) of the
process. In the last phase of the method, the generated traces are merged into an
activity graph, which is later transformed into a BPMN model. Figure 2 shows
an illustrative overview of the proposed method with a distinction of its phases
and the scope of the technical solution presented in the dissertation.

Requirements deﬁnition
? 0
Lane
Pool

Output: Initial/Goal states
Lane

Data collection
Input: Manually-inserted data
Output: Structured ﬁles I
Speciﬁcation merge
Input: Structured ﬁles
Output: Validated speciﬁcation II
CSP Solving
alldifferent(P)
length(P) <= 4*|T|
Input: Validated speciﬁcation
Output: Synthetic workﬂow log III
Model Construction
Input: Synthetic workﬂow log
Output: BPMN model IV
Semi-Automated Toolkit

Fig. 2: Outline of the approach which consists of four main phases and a prelim-
inary step. Based on [9].
The algorithms developed to solve the problems stated in this work served
as an input to the conceptual and functional design of a process modeling soft-
ware. The designed application consists of two modules: Specification Editor
for creating declarative process specifications and Process Composer for process
composition based on prepared specifications.
Finally, the performance of the methods presented in the dissertation was an-
alyzed by using a dedicated methodology, as well as existing metrics for business
process models. The evaluation consisted of the following steps:
– introducing a novel methodology to verify the correctness of a generated
model with respect to its admissible execution sequences,
– defining the composition accuracy metric and verifying the proposed ap-
proach based on a set of example process models,
– conducting a survey among business and academic users to assess the appli-
cability of the proposed declarative specification.
The results show that the proposed method of acquiring process data is
efficient by being convenient also for users who are less experienced with Business
Process Management. In addition, the model construction algorithm generates
a prototype diagram that can be further enriched in one of the available editors.
The following results are considered the main contribution of the dissertation:
1. The taxonomy of automated process generation methods.
2. The concept of participatory process modeling.
3. The phases needed to generate BPMN models based on activity descriptions.
4. The concept of an activity graph synthesized based on a generated log.
5. The algorithm to construct a BPMN model, including the formalization of
the process model and constraint-based identification of logical structures.
6. The prototype of a software system implementing the proposed approach.
7. The implementation of the Process Composer module, which is used to gen-
erate a BPMN model based on a declarative process specification.

3 Published Papers
During the development of this dissertation, several research works have been
published in different journals, conferences, and workshops. The research pre-
sented in these publications served as a basis to obtain the results presented in
the thesis and support its scientific quality. The published research ideas include:
– a comparative overview of process model generation techniques [10],
– the concept of business process modeling based on spreadsheets [11] and the
use of spreadsheet as an interoperability standard for process modeling [12],
– the basis of the method to generate a synthetic workflow log based on an
unordered list of activities [13,14],
– the concept of process model decomposition into reusable sub-diagrams [15],
– the definition of a method to evaluate generated models based on a synthetic
set of workflow traces [16],
– the basic concept of BPMN model construction based on a workflow log [9,17].
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