5 CONCLUSIONS
This paper represents a contribution in the process
modeling issues. In particular it concerns with the
relationships between processes and operative
environment that drives to a context-based process
model specialization.
We propose a pattern-driven approach to capture
and explicitly represent abstract problem–solving
knowledge. This approach uses a decision tables set
to formalize the relationships between all the
possible environment factor configurations and the
specialized solutions.
This approach has been experimented in a real
context with encouraging results. The combined use
of the pattern-driven model and the decision table
notation has been able to promptly react to each
environment change. In particular, it is adequate
mainly for expecting changes because the pattern-
driven approach permits to show the path for the
new specialized solution: a new context factor value
implies a table consultation and the extraction of
new specialized actions in order to re-modeling the
business process on use. The proposed approach is
useful also for unexpected changes because it
implies the reorganization of relationships between
processes and the operative context through a quick
decision table update.
In order to validate the proposed approach, we
have conducted an on-field investigation in several
industrial environments using two automated tools.
Our future studies will be aimed to the optimization
of these tools.
REFERENCES
Bar-Or, A., Keren, D., Schuster, A., Wolff, R., 2005,
Hierarchical Decision Tree Induction in Distributed
Genomic Databases, IEEE Transactions on
Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol.17.
Bhat, J. M., Deshmukh, N., 2005, Methods for Modeling
Flexibility in Business Processes. In 6
th
Workshop on
Business Process Modeling, Development and
Support. Business Processes and Support Systems:
Design for Flexibility.
Brynjolfsson, E., Malone, T., Gurbaxani, J. and Kambil,
A., 1989, Does Information Technology Lead to
Smaller Firms?, Technical report 106. Center for
Coordination Science, MIT.
Elzinga, D.J., Horak, T., Lee, C.Y., Bruner, C., 2005,
Business process management: survey and
methodology Engineering Management, IEEE
Transactions Vol. 42/2, pp.119 – 128, IEEE Computer
Society.
Ho, T.B., Cheung, D., and Liu, H., 2005, Advances in
Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 9
th
Pacific-
Asia Conference, Vietnam.
Hongli, W., Baolin, Y., Xia, Z., Gang, X., 2006 A
Workflow Model Supporting Flexible Process Based
on Extensible Organization, School of Computer
Science & Engineering, Beihang University.
Maes, R., Van Dijk, J. E. M., 1988, On the Role of
Ambiguity and Incompleteness in the Design of
Decision Tables and Rule-Based Systems, The
Computer Journal, 31(6).
Malone, T.W., Crowston, K., Lee, J., Pentland, B., 2003,
Tools for Inventing Organizations: Toward a
Handbook of Organizational Processes, In 2
nd
IEEE
Workshop on Enabling Tech. Infrastructure for
Collaborative Enterprises.
Morisio, M., Tully, C., Ezran, M., 2000, Diversity in
Reuse Processes, IEEE Software Vol.17 N°.4, pp. 56-
63, IEEE Computer Society.
Singh, M.P., Chopra, A.K., Desai, N.V., Mallya, A.U.,
2004, Protocols for processes: programming in the
large for open systems, In 19
th
annual ACM SIGPLAN
Conference on Object-oriented programming systems,
languages, and application.
Van der Aalst, W.M.P., Van Hee, K.M., 1996, Business
Process Redesign: A Petri-net-based approach, Vol
29(1-2) 1996. pp:15-26, Computers in Industry.
Van der Aalst, W.M.P., Ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Weske,
M., 2003, Business Process Management: A Survey,
In International Conference on Business Process
Management.
Van der Aalst, W.M.P., Ter Hofstede, A.H.M.,
Kiepuszewski, B., Barros, A.P., 2003, Workflow
Patterns, 14(1) 2003. pp:5-51, Distributed and
Parallel Databases.
Vanthienen, J., Mues, C., Wets, G., Delaere, K., 1998, A
tool-supported approach to inter-tabular verification,
Expert Systems with Applications, 15, pp. 277-285.
Winn, T., Calder, P., 2002, “Is this a pattern?”, IEEE
Software Vol.19, N°1 pp. 59-66, IEEE Computer
Society.
Yao, Q., Chen, Z., Wang, H., 2006, Improving Flexibility
and Reusage of Business Process Management: the
Role of Cased-based Reasoning Technique, ICEBE’06
IEEE International Conference on e-Business
Engineering.
ENASE 2008 - International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering
156