Multi-party Business Process Resilience By-Design: A Data-Centric Perspective

Abstract

Nowadays every business organization operates in ecosystems and cooperation is mandatory. If, on the one side, this increases the opportunities for the involved organizations, on the other side, every actor is a potential source of failures with impacts on the entire ecosystem. For this reason, resilience is a feature that multi-party business processes today must enforce. As resilience concerns the ability to cope with unplanned situations, managing the critical issues is usually a run-time task.\ud \ud The aim of this work is to emphasize awareness on resilience in multi-party business processes also at design-time, when a proper analysis of involved data allows the process designer to identify (possible) failures, their impact, and thus improving the process model. Using a data-centric collaboration-oriented language for processes, i.e., OMG CMMN – Case Management Model and Notation, as modeling notation, our approach allows the designer to model a flexible business process that, at run-time, results easier to manage in case of failures

Design-time Models for Resiliency

“…However, if we focus on what is affected when a failure occurs, some improvements can be done also at design-time. In [26] we proposed an approach for assessing the resilience of business processes modeled with CMMN, and assigning to the specification a value in the range [0..3] in order to measure how much the specification has been designed with resilience in mind. In this work, we focus on providing more specific details on the conceptual modeling languages to be used during the specification, focusing in particular on representing temporal aspects which play an important role for resilience, as it will be shown in the following examples.…”

“…In the first type of scenario, periodic reporting based on sensor data is considered. In this case, e.g., considered in [26], the input source is a stream of collected sensor data, and the system is based on the data collection interval and it can be influenced also by its frequency. Where data sources are considered unreliable, there is the need of investigating if other sources of information (current or historical) are available.…”

“…In this paper, we focus on designing ISs to make them resilient by design, i.e., considering the improvement of their reliability in case of expected and unexpected faults. In [26], we analyzed the characteristics needed for designing a resilient information system using a process-based representation of the IS. As in most process-based approaches to IS modeling, the data model is considered only marginally and often detached from the process model.…”

A methodology for analysis and assessment of business processes of Ukrainian enterprises

“…That will help to distinguish and eliminate causes of existing discrepancies, and also determine their possible occurrence. Process approach is an effective and relevant means of achieving competitive advantages as it focuses the activity of the enterprise on business processes, and orients the enterprise management system on the management of each business process individually and their totality in the enterprise as a whole and / or in the framework of certain projects that are implemented by the enterprise (Plebani et al, 2017;Trkman et al, 2015).…”

A design-time data-centric maturity model for assessing resilience in multi-party business processes

“…As an extension of the work presented in [29], this work introduces a formalization of the approach where data are considered as "first class citizens", because their unavailability could determine the failure of the processes. The proposed formalization includes an extension of OMG CMMN with some additional elements required to express the alternative data and milestones.…”