DSV Blog

Last week A/Prof Arthur ter Hofstede from QUT visited us at DSV. Arthur is co-leader of the Business Process Management group (BPM) at the Faculty of Information
Technology at the Queensland University of
Technology (QUT) in Brisbane,
Australia.
Together with Prof. Wil van der Aalst from TUE and QUT, he is leading the work
of the Workflow Patterns Initiative and the work on development and
implementation of the language YAWL. I started cooperating with Arthur’s research
group during my postdoc studies and I have visited QUT a numerous
times since 2001 (latest in May this year). Our cooperation is on suitability analysis of
languages and standards for Business Process Management. Earlier results
include analyses of BML, BPEL4WS, UMN2.0 AD and BPMN. During Arthur’s visit we continued
working on an analysis of two open source workflow management systems.

During the period 20th-26th of September 2007, Nick Russell from TUE visited us at DSV. Nick wrote his PhD thesis within the Business Process Management group (BPM) at the Faculty of Information Technology at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia, where he worked under the supervision of A/Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede and Prof. Wil van der Aalst. Nick’s research interest is in the area of suitability of workflow languages for process modeling. He has done major contributions within the Workflow Pattern Initiative with his work on data, resource and exception handling patterns, as well as extensions and formalization of the control-flow patterns. He has also been involved in the work with newYAWL. Nick moved recently from QUT to TUE, where he will do his postdoc in the group of Prof. Wil van der Aalst.

Nick initiated his visit at DSV with giving a seminar “An Introduction to the Workflow Patterns and newYAWL” on the 20th of September 2007. During his stay we worked on finalizing the evaluation of two open source workflow management systems – a work which was initiated earlier during the year and which also involves Arthur and Wil.

Last week of November 2007, I visited Nick Russell and Prof. Wil van der Aalst at Technical University of Eindhoven (TUE), in The Netherlands.

During my visit we worked on summarising the results from our work on patterns-based evaluation of open source systems and presenting them in a paper, which we submitted to the CAiSE 2008 conference.

I also used the opportunity to meet Sybrand Jongejans from COSA. COSA GmbH is a companly initiated in 1979 in Germeny and now well established in the Netherlands. Their product, COSA-BPM is a workflow management system, which I am interested in to investigate for teaching purposes. Sybrand Jongejans provided me kindly with a free licence of the product.

The work on patterns-based evaluation of three major open source workflow management systems was finalized in December 2007. The evaluated systems are:

• jBPM
• OpenWFE
• Enhydra Shark

All three systems are written in Java. Paul Harmon outlines them, in his article from 31st of July 2007, as the most often mentioned systems he has come across. We selected them for our evaluation because they are regularly updated and their web sites provide an indication of an active and sizeable user community. jBPM is part of JBoss (a commercial company), Enhydra Shark supports XPDL (the standard proposed by the WfMC) and OpenWFE is an active project on Sourceforge, labelled as “Production/Stable”, and having more than 100,000 downloads.

The workflow patterns were used as evaluation framework.

The work was conducted in cooperation with Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). The results are presented in a technical report (draft version) which is co-authored by myself, Birger Andersson (from Syslab, SU/KTH), Arthur ter Hofstede (QUT), Nick Russell (TUE), and Wil van der Aalst (TUE). The report was sent for review to the developers of the three systems. It is also published on the BPM Center and on the workflow patterns web sites.

Due to some of the authors’ close involvement, the YAWL system was not considered in this evaluation.

In December 2007 we established a contact with Tibco, Sweden.

On 3rd of December, we had a meeting with:

Mark Rattley - Vice President UKI, Nordics & MEA Region,
Jan Hygstedt - Country Manager Nordics, and
Mårten Nilsson - Solution Architect;

all representatives from Tibco. From DSV Prof. Paul Johannesson, Birger Anderson, Michael Persson and myself attended the meeting. I gave a brief presentation of DSV and Paul introduced Syslab. Mark introduced the company and gave an overview of Tibco’s University Relations Program.

I contacted Tibco, because I am interested in investigating their workflow management system called iProcess Suite for teaching purposes. After the meeting I was invited to join two courses on the product: BPM200 Essentials of TIBCO BPM 10.x and BPM205 Designing with the TIBCO iProcess tm Modeler 10.x., which I did during week 50. Bram van Tol, from the Netherlands, was course leader. He provided a high quality training on the tool. I would like to thank Mark, Jan and Mårten for providing me with the opportunity to join the course. I am looking forward to a continued co-operation.

Business Process Reengineering, Business Process Management, Workflow Management Systems and Process Aware Information Systems are a few concepts circulating around during the last decade and denoting a special kind of information systems or activities relevant for their development and utilization. These concepts address the intersection of the Information Systems and Business Management areas. As in any young discipline, this area suffers from a terminological blur, i.e. different people define the concepts above differently and sometimes the definitions are overlapping. Therefore, we start with a brief overview of the concepts we have adopted.

Terminology

During mid 90 the ideas of Business Process Rengineering (BPR) from the U.S. gained increased attention. BPR denoted an organized effort of a company to streamline its processes. It was defined by Hammer and Champy [2]

“… the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.”

BPR can be carried out at organizational level only. However, as most companies today are dependent on IT-systems that also influence the way of working, a BPR effort usually result in new needs and requirements put on the underlying IT support. If satisfied, these needs can significantly increase the benefit of the undergone business reengineering. One of the main critiques towards BPR regards its focus on a major solitary change, which can not sufficiently capture the continuous dynamics and evolution of an enterprise. As a result of this, in late 90s and early 00s the attention shifted from BPR to Business Process Management (BPM). Business Process Management includes, according to Weske [4],

“.. concepts, methods, and techniques to support the design, administration, configuration, enactment, and analysis of business processes.”

A Business Process is the ordering of a set of activities in an organization for achieving certain goals. A case is a specific instantiation of a business process. The administration of cases, hence business process execution, can be supported through software systems. A system specifically developed for this purposed is called a workflow management system (WFMS). A Workflow is defined by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) as the

“.. automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for actions according to a set of procedural rules” [5]

Because of present confusion between the terms (business) process and workflow, we will refer to a workflow as the technical implementation of a (business) process in a Workflow Management System. Workflow models, which are usually graphical, are used to specify the process under consideration. A Workflow Management System (WFMS) is a system which can read, interpret, and execute processes by scheduling and distributing work to different agents according to workflow models. More precisely a WFMS is according to the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC):

“A System that defines, creates and manages the execution of workflow through the use of software, running on one or more workflow engine, which is able to interpret the process definition, interact with workflow participants and, where required, invoke the use of IT tools and applications.” [5]

Figure 1 below shows the Workflow Reference Model by WfMC, defined approximately ten years ago. During these ten years also the term Business Process Management Suits (BPMS) has appeared and been adopted by some of the former WFMS vendors who now market their products as BPMS. Some (e.g. Gartner) claims that BPMS adds to the WFMS (which traditionally were build to support the document routing) the aspect of system connectivity. Indeed, while the development WFMS started thirty years ago as document routing systems, they have grown to exactly workflow management (and not document management) systems (which can also be seen from the ten years old Workflow Reference Model in Figure 1). We consider therefore the term BPMS as just a modern denotation for the traditional WFMS, simply aligned with the BPM trend terminology.

Fig 1 The Workflow Reference Model by WfMC

Recently, in 2005 the term process aware information system was coined. A Process Aware Information Systems (PAIS) is a

“software system that manages and executes the operational processes involving people, application, and/or information sources on the basis of process models” [1].

PAIS incorporates a wider spectrum of tools including WFMS, Case Handling Systems, Groupware (such as project management tools and process-aware collaboration tools), process/services composition etc. The lifecycle of a PAIS is depicted in Figure 2. Interesting to note is that in addition to the WFMS there is a category of tools focusing exclusively on supporting the business process analysis and modeling phase.

Fig 2 The PAIS life cycle (copied from [1])

Languages and Systems

As apparent from the previous section the area of BPM and Workflow system has been developing rapidly during the last decade. New business process modeling and implementation notations have been established and join the existing ones in continues development. Figure 3 chart the mainstream languages in the area. The obvious question is how these languages, which are created with the same purpose, i.e. business process modeling, compare to each other.

Since 2002, in cooperation with A/Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede, BPM Group, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Prof. Wil van der Aalst, BPM Center, Technical University of Eindhoven (TUE) and QUT, we have been working on a number of deep analyses and comparisons of BPM languages. The method of work has been to study the languages through one same evaluation framework, The Workflow Patterns framework, developed at QUT, was used for this purpose. The framework was developed through a bottom-up analysis of more than 15 WFMS, during which a number of patterns were extracted and systemized into three categories: control-flow, data, and resource patterns.

Fig 3 Business process modeling languages (copied from [3])

The green shading in Figure 3 show the languages in which analyses we have been participated. (The results are listed below.) The blue shading show the analyses performed by our partners. The red shading show an analysis (with the same workflow patterns framework) performed by other researchers.

• BML
• BPEL4WS
• BPML (WSCI)
• UML 2.0 AD
• BPMN

Recently, our work was extended to with the workflow patterns framework analyse some mainstream workflow management systems. The suitability of the following open-source offerings for BPM was studied:

• jBPM
• OpenWFE
• Enhydra Shark

Preliminary results from this work are reported here. The report is currently under review by the vendors.

References

[1] M. Dumas, W.M.P van der Aalst and A. ter Hofstede, Process Aware Information Systems: Bridging People and Software through Process Technology, John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2005

[2] M. Hammer and J. Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, Harper Business, 1993

[3] 5. M. Josuttis, SOA in Practice, OReilly, 2007

[4] M. Weske, Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architerctures, Springer, 2007

[5] The Workflow Management Coalition, “Terminology and Glossary”, WFMC-TC-1011, http://www.wfmc.org/standards/docs/TC-1011_term_glossary_v3.pdf, 1999.

Today Paul, Martin Henkel, Birger, and myself submitted a project proposal to the Swedish Research Council.

Title: Service Oriented Systems Architecture for Knowledge Intensive Processes

Abstract: Software support for well structured business processes is today
provided through workflow technology and process management tools. Tailored to
support well structured processes, these tools provide only poor support for loosely
structured work activities such as knowledge intensive processes. Knowledge intensive
processes are heavily reliant on professional knowledge, deal with large amounts of data,
and tasks that can be redone several times. The purpose of the project is to bring together
state-of-the-art research in business process management systems and knowledge management
to design an open service oriented architecture for supporting knowledge intensive processes.
This architecture will enable flexible process enactment, configurable and context-aware user
interfaces, and service based task support.

Project Proposal
Popular Description (in Swedish)

Last Thursday, 25th of April 2008, Dr. Guido Governatori from University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane, Australia, visited DSV. Guido gave a presentation on Compliance Checking between Business Process and Business Contracts.

Abstract: It is a typical scenario that many organisations have their business processes specified independently of their business contracts. This is because of the lack of guidelines and tools that facilitate derivation of processes from contracts but also because of the traditional mindset of treating contracts separately from business processes. This talk will provide a solution to one specific problem that arises from this situation, namely the lack of mechanisms to check whether business processes are compliant with business contracts. The central part of this talk focuses on a logic based formalism for describing both the semantics of contract and the semantics of compliance checking procedures.

Thanks Guido for your visit and for an interesting presentation.

I torsdags 29 maj besökte Peter Tallungs, Objectware, oss på DSV och gav en presentation om informationsmodellering. “Informationsmodellering har en nyckelroll inom verksamhets- och systemutveckling, men är trots det en till stora delar bortglömd och outvecklad konst.” (säger Peter)

Peter arbetar som verksamhetsarkitekt och verksamhetsanalytiker. Han arbetar för att skapa en ny generation verksamhetsarkitekter som kan arbeta nära de dagliga leveranserna, och därmed göra en direkt nytta och få effektiv återkoppling. Peter har i många år intresserat sig för att utveckla arbetssätten och kunskapen inom it-området. Han föreläser ofta på konferenser, han är styrelsemedlem i IASA Sweden (International Association
of Software Architects) och har haft en egen kolumn i Computer Sweden i fyra år. Han håller också kurser inom informationsmodellering, både hos Astrakan och i en egen Master Class. Peter har tagit fram ett nytt arbetssätt för verksamhetsanalys och it-krav, där vad han kallar “rika modeller” har en central roll. Arbetssättet används idag på många håll i branschen, även av stora företag. I synnerhet har Peter intresserat sig för informationsmodellens roll, som han anser är en nyckelroll.

Tack för den finna presentationen Peter. Vi ser fram emot fortsatta diskussioner och samarbete inom området.

Last Sunday I left Stockholm for a six weeks long visit of the BPM group at QUT (Queensland University of Technology) in Brisbane, Australia. On my way to Brisbane I stopped for a couple of days in Tokyo to visit John Mettraux, who is the main driving force behind OpenWFE – one of the open source workflow management systems I evaluated recently.

John had invited me to join him on a meeting of the BPM interest group in Tokyo, called BPMinna, and give a short presentation of YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language – the language and open source WFMS developed by the research groups of Prof. Wil van der Aalst and Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede from QUT and TUE). The meeting took place in Shibuya (“one of the busiest places in Tokyo”) last Monday evening. It was organised by Wakizaka-san from Cosolva and hosted by iKnow. It started with a brief demo of iKnow’s product (which is a software product for supporting the teaching and learning of English for Japanese speaking people), followed by my presentation of YAWL (which can be downloaded here YAWL-Tokyo-July08-2.zip), and a presentation of the latest news on OpenWFEru (Ruote for short, i.e. the Ruby version of OpenWFE) given by John. The meeting attracted 25 attenders, both developers and business analysts, from companies such as IT Frontier Corporation, Oracle, Casio, Toshiba etc. The other two presentations were given in Japanese.

The meeting continued with a social dinner in a traditional Japanese restaurant which I was invited to. I would like to express my thanks to John Mettraux for inviting me to this meeting, to Wakizaka-san both for organising the meeting and for translating and annotating my presentation to Japanese, and to BPMinna for showing interest in YAWL and for a delicious dinner.

The second day of my visit was spent on discussions on WFMS with John. John also helped me with installing Ruote on my machine, as I am intending to having a look of it during the time in Australia.

John, thanks for your time and great hospitality!

Link to John’s blog post for the event.