Thesis Title

A Framework for the Modeling and Measurement of Workflow Systems
Mario Peralta

Thesis Intro

Nowadays organizations need to adapt to the new commercial conditions, as well as to respond to competitive pressures, in which they must assure the quality of their products and the efficiency of their services, facing the necessity to consider not only the business environment (suppliers, competitors, clients, etc.), but also the evaluation of their information systems. Therefore, an increasing interest has been observed on the part of the organization in managing its business processes (BP), which are defined as a structured set of activities, designed to produce a certain exit or to obtain an objective, that describe how the work of the organization is made and that are observable, measurable, with room for improvement and repetitive [ 5 ].
     
      The real BP are characterized by being: big and complex, very dynamic, widely distributed and customized, of long operation, automated, dependent on the intelligence and criteria of humans, and difficult to make visible [9], and its complexity has led the organizations to understand the necessity to aim for the management and improvement of the business processes.
     
      According to the complex nature of the business processes, studies have been carried out on diverse aspects such as the utility [7], quality evaluation [1] or the measurement [10], being still more frequent studies on the use of the different tools and languages to carry out the modeling of business processes, such as seen in [2, 3, 11] just to mention some. This interest has been mainly fomented by the diversity of existing notations and languages for the modeling, definition and execution of the business processes.
     
      Analyzing business processes lifecycle [4], it is of great importance to carry out a continuous improvement and this has taken the organizations to look for the tools that provide the necessary support in order to make these improvements. Nowadays, the Business Processes Management (BPM) provides this support by means of the Business Processes Management Systems (BPMS), that can be defined as the capacity to discover, to design, to develop, to execute and to interact with the operation, optimization and analysis of processes [9].
     
      In order to give support to the business processes management one of the most significant technologies are the Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) that give support to the automatization and which are defined by the WfMC (Workflow Management Coalition) like: "a system that defines, creates and directs the execution of workflows through the use of software that works in one or more machines of workflow, being able to interpret the process definition, to interact with the participants of the workflow and to invoke the use of tools and applications of the Information Technologies" [6]. A process of workflow, considered in a simplified form as workflow, is a special type of business process that can be managed by a WFMS.
     
      One of the basic aspects in every workflow management system is to have a suitable process modeling language which assures the organization doing the correct tasks, at the right time and the right way. For that reason it is considered of fundamental importance to have a good representation of the process in which all the aspects of interest are included. An important reference of the bibliography are Activity diagrams of UML, that can be used for a suitable description of organizational processes. A great advantage of this notation is that it is standard and is supported by multiple tools. Nevertheless, this type of diagrams provides representations at high level that cannot be used to be interpreted and executed by a WFMS.
      Another of the fundamental aspects in the business processes management is its continuous improvement, and to be promoted it is necessary to provide the suitable support to the measurement of its more relevant elements with the purpose of detecting the areas and aspects to improve.
     
      All in all, the objective of the doctoral thesis is to promote the improvement of the workflow systems by means of the development of a modeling language of workflows, taking as a basis the standard notation of the activity diagrams of UML and extending this notation to ease the execution of these models in workflow managing systems of job streams. On the other hand, appropriate support will be provided for the measurement of the developed workflow models, facilitating the improvement of defined workflows.

Thesis Info

The present doctoral thesis project focuses on the business processes management by means of the modeling and measurement of advanced workflow systems based on extensions of the existing formalisms and a series of metrics to measure their quality.
     
      The investigation lines of the thesis can be summarized in the following objectives:

1. Development of a language for the modeling of workflow oriented to their subsequent control, execution and measurement. The proposed language will be based on the activity diagrams of UML and will include concrete extensions for the modeling of workflow systems, having emphasized the following aspects:
   • Modeling of concurrent workflows, extending the UML metamodel for the modeling of activity diagrams of UML, and providing a notation compatible with the standard of the WfMC.
   • Modeling of critic applications and workflow by means of temporary restrictions
2. Proposal of metric on the quality of the workflow models. The defined metrics will be validated theoretically and empirically according to the method of work described in [8]
3. Development of a Support Tool for the modeling and measurement of workflows
        

Thesis References

[1] Becker, J., Rosemann, M., y von Uthmann, C. Guidelines of Business Process Modeling. in Business Process Management, Models, Techniques and Empirical Studies (BPM´00). Springer. ISBN 3-540-67454-3 pp 30-49. (2000)

[2] Dewalt, C., Business Process Modeling with UML, Johns Hopkins University. (1999).

[3] Dufresne, T. y Martin, J., Process Modeling for e-Business, in Dr. Larry Kerschberg (ed) Information Systems Department, George Mason University. (2003).

[4] Georgakopoulos, D. y Tsalgatidou, A., Technology and Tools for Comprehensive Business Process Lifecycle Management, in Workflow Management Systems and Interoperability. Springer V. p. pp 324-365.(1998)

[5] Jiménez, C., Farías, L., y Pinto, F., Análisis de Modelos de Procesos de Negocios en Relación a la Dimensión Informática., in Revista Ingeniería InformáticaEdición No. 9. Revista Electrónica del IICC: Chile. (2003). http://www.inf.udec.cl/revista/ediciones/edicion9/cjimenez.pdf

[6] Lawrence, P., Workflow Handbook 1997, ed. I. Jonh Wiley & Sons. New York: Workflow Management Coalition. (1997).

[7] Rappa, M.A., The utility business model and the future of computing services. IBM Systems Journal. Vol. 43 Issue 1 p. 32-42. (2004)

[8] Serrano, M., Piattini, M., Calero, C., Genero, M. y Miranda, D. (2002). Un método para la definición de métricas de software. Proceedings of the 1er Workshop en Métodos de Investigación y Fundamentos filosóficos en Ingeniería del Software y Sistemas de Información (MIFISIS'2002), pp. 65-74.

[9] Smith, H., et al., The Emergence of Business Process Management, CSC´s Research Services (2002).

[10] Vitolins, V. Business Process Measures. In Proceedings of Int. Conference on BALTIC DB&IS. Riga, Latvia. pp. 186-197. (2004).

[11] White, S.A., Process Modeling Notation and Workflow Patterns, IBM Corp.: USA. (2004). www.bptrends.com