Defining business process flexibility with the help of invariants

Regev, Gil; Bider, Ilia; Wegmann, Alain

doi:10.1002/spip.301

Cited by 39 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…The notion of flexibility is often viewed in terms of the ability of an organisation's processes and supporting technologies to adapt to these changes [22,7]. An alternate view advanced by Regev and Wegmann [13] is that flexibility should be considered from the opposite perspective i.e., in terms of what stays the same not what changes. Indeed, a process can only be considered to be flexible if it is possible to change it without needing to replace it completely [14].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Process Flexibility: A Survey of Contemporary Approaches

Schonenberg

Mans

Russell

et al. 2008

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

229

143

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Abstract. Business processes provide a means of coordinating interactions between workers and organisations in a structured way. However the dynamic nature of the modern business environment means these processes are subject to a increasingly wide range of variations and must demonstrate flexible approaches to dealing with these variations if they are to remain viable. The challenge is to provide flexibility and offer process support at the same time. Many approaches have been proposed in literature and some of these approaches have been implemented in flexible workflow management systems. However, a comprehensive overview of the various approaches has been missing. In this paper, we take a deeper look into the various ways in which flexibility can be achieved and we propose an extensive taxonomy of flexibility. This taxonomy is subsequently used to evaluate a selection of systems and to discuss how the various forms of flexibility fit together.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Process Flexibility: A Survey of Contemporary Approaches

Schonenberg

Mans

Russell

et al. 2008

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

229

143

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In other words, the work presented in this paper should be seen as an augmentation of existing systems, that is independent of -but compatible with -the view of the world presented in (Regev, Bider, Wegmann, 2007). The languages used in the BPMS can largely be left in place, and flexibility is gained through extra soft goal annotations.…”

Section: Related Researchmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Soffer introduced a taxonomy between hard and soft constraints, and applied these labels to general categories of constraints such as environmental constraints, sharing dependency constraints, goal reachability constraints etc. (Soffer, 2005) In a recent paper Regev, Bider, and Wegmann presented an approach to flexibility using invariants (Regev, Bider, Wegmann, 2007). Conceptually a process run is seen as a trajectory through a state space and time, and process specification then becomes a matter of limiting the trajectory while finding allowable movement in space-time that brings the process closer to the preset goals.…”

Section: Related Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using soft constraints to guide users in flexible business process management systems

Stefansen

Borch

2008

IJBPIM

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Current BPMS allow designers to specify processes in highly expressive languages supporting numerous control flow constructs, exceptions, compensation handling, complex predicates, policies, etc. The resulting specification can be anything from extremely flexible to extremely rigid, but there is an unfortunate trade-off: rigid specifications become a hindrance when unanticipated deviations occur, and too flexible specifications lack information about best practices and recommended order, because everything is possible. Both specifications are expressed exclusively in terms of hard constraints and even very clever specifications can only partially alleviate this. When the process designer writes the process as described by the business analyst, inevitably important intentional information is either abandoned or promoted to hard constraints. We argue that hard constraints are insufficient, and that they lead to either rigid (dictatorial) or support-less (anarchistic) process specifications. Soft constraints can make this trade-off less painful. If process designers can write soft constraints directly in the business process specification, the BPMS can accommodate unanticipated deviations while having enough information about best practices to guide the user through the process. As a consequence we suggest strongly to prefer soft constraints over hard constraints. Soft constraints can specify not only that some rules can be violated, but also by how much and how serious a concrete violation is. The BPMS should allow designers to easily specify soft goals and allow its users to immediately see the seriousness of their violations at runtime. We believe this provides a desirable combination of guidance and flexibility that is not otherwise attainable. To achieve this soft goals must be made explicit in the process model and be understood by the BPMS. We outline how this is done using a multi-criteria optimization problem formulation, and suggest some changes to the design methodology employed by process designers.

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“…Hence, this capability is not always beneficial, because some changes can be contradictory to the strategy of an organization. In [20] invariants for business processes are introduced and formalized. Invariants define an identity of an organization that must remain unchanged.…”

Section: Validation Of Refinement From La To Da Using Alloy Analyzmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-level design and analysis of business processes the advantages of declarative specifications

Rychkova

Regev

Wegmann

2008

2008 Second International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science

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Abstract-Business process modeling techniques, such as BPMN, encourage the early specification of the exact order in which the activities of the process will be executed. However, a business process may be exposed to different environments and subjected to many conditions in which a sequence cannot be identified at design time.We present declarative business process specifications that can be used to align optional process customizations, as well as process redesign, with the business strategy of the organization. These specifications complement the traditional (imperative) business process model by specifying the process independently from a particular environment.

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Defining business process flexibility with the help of invariants

Cited by 39 publications

References 11 publications

Process Flexibility: A Survey of Contemporary Approaches

Process Flexibility: A Survey of Contemporary Approaches

Using soft constraints to guide users in flexible business process management systems

High-level design and analysis of business processes the advantages of declarative specifications

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