BPM Research

Thesis project released (under revision)

2011-08-19T02:21:00.000-07:00

Montero thesis-project

View more documents from Ildefonso Montero.

Bufalo released!

2010-12-09T01:48:00.000-08:00

After many months of work, I have finally completed one of the most important milestones of my doctoral thesis. Specifically, the implementation of a software tool to support the proposed Business Family Engineering methodology.

I named this tool with the name bufalo. Its aim is to cover the stages of "Business Family Domain Engineering" explained here. The following chart can be viewed as phases have been defined that are supported by the tool and which require the user to be performed.

Obviously the first phase, corresponding to Business Family Requirements Engineering takes place entirely by the user, as it is who defines the family members, their requirements, goals, etc. There are lots of tools that support these tasks, Enterprise Architect being the most commonly used alternative. That is why Bufalo is able to integrate and interact with the API of Enterprise Architect and obtain a complete definition of requirements specification document for each member of the family, independently of the template used. Besides the definitions of each business can be formatted in wiki format for project management applications such as Redmine and Trac, among others.

Once we have the definition of each business is when bufalo acts as a suitable position in the second phase, corresponding to Business Family Domain Design, orchestrating the process of extracting the business objectives of the definition, transforming these objectives a model of variability in the format you want, in the current version supports FAMA, and getting the definition of the core framework through a transformation process ATL between features and models business processes defined in BPMN.

Technically speaking, Bufalo is presented as a Maven plugin that can be launched through continuous integration systems like Hudson, which integrate into a software ecosystem is quite simple. The business definitions can be hosted on Subversion repositories and will be bufalo type who remove these definitions of the routes indicated process and get the core framework of each, as well as a definition of a Java object representing the family business identifiable by removing tags using the service in the cloud Yahoo Term Extraction. BPMN and FAMA models will be uploaded due to the Subversion user specified for each of the definitions of business.

Since the first version of the product, for now the definition of transformation rules as well as the evolution of business model are bound to be made by the user. At the end of the first quarter of next year is planned the publication of the release of the first version of this product, by now you can see how does the extraction of information from a business document defined in Enterprise Architect in the next video.

A real experience of BPMN implementation

2010-08-19T02:26:00.000-07:00

Hi all, I will share with you a real experience of implementation of BPMN as a language for specification of business processes. One of the last projects I am working on is the definition of the procedures of the IT department of the Ministry of Employment of the Andalusian Goverment

I took the occasion to conduct a pilot project of introduction of BPMN as a notation for defining such procedures. The results are still excellent. We have a total of 42 99 business processes defined and have defined a template agile enough to have all the information necessary and sufficient.

The learning curve from the staff of the department has been very smooth and are pretty happy with the work done. With regard to the technical aspect, in principle thought to install an instance of Oryx, but I finally decided to make use of Visio templates and distribution of the definitions within the IT department collaborative environment based on Redmine.

Citations revisited

2010-08-19T02:17:00.000-07:00

- From Feature Models to Business Processes
- Representing Runtime Variability in Business Driven Development Systems
- Business Family Engineering. Does it make sense?

Spanish Version of BPMN 2.0 Poster Available

2010-01-15T01:01:00.000-08:00

I had the pleasure of participating in the Spanish translation of the official poster BPMN 2.0 together with two renowned researchers in the field of business process management such as Luciano Garcia-Banuelos and Marlon Dumas

On the BPM Offensive Berlin website you can get the Spanish version

Call for Participation - BPMN-Selftest by HU Berlin

2010-01-10T23:50:00.000-08:00

The colleagues of BPMN-Selftest needs Spanish testers! test your knowledge of BPMN now!

=================================
Call for Participation - BPMN-Selftest by HU Berlin
=================================

Dear all,
we have launched a new website where you can test your comprehension of BPMN models at http://www.bpmn-selftest.org. The website is part of a research project of HU Berlin and TU Eindhoven. It will only be available until the end of February. While already more than 200 people from Germany and the Netherlands did the test, we have seen hardly any testers from Spain.

We would be very happy if you could participate and recommend the website to your process modeling colleagues. Its unique feature is that you get BPMN models shown along with questions. In the end you get immediate and individual feedback on what you did right and wrong. There is also a draw for prizes.

Thank you!
Jan

=====================================
Check out http://www.bpmn-selftest.org
=====================================
Prof. Dr. Jan Mendling
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät
Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik
Spandauer Straße 1, 10178 Berlin, Germany
Email: jan.mendling@wiwi.hu-berlin.de
Phone: +49 30 2093 5805
Fax: +49 30 2093 5741
Web: www.mendling.com
=====================================

Building an Oryx stencilset for Business Family Engineering

2010-01-08T05:49:00.000-08:00

First of all, to congratulate Oryx developers team for their excellent work. The learning curve to develop new stencilsets is very soft.

I have decided, as self-purpose for this new year, to develop the I.T. infrastructure for providing support to my PhD proposal, a methodological framework for designing business information system families.

As a first step, I'm evaluating to define my own stencilsets in Oryx. The truth is that I'm quite happy with the result. More info about tool support, comming soon ...

Dealing with Multiparty Interactions and Variability on Choreography Modeling (Work in progress)

2009-12-09T04:11:00.000-08:00

For our next paper, we are designing a set of patterns, that were presented previously in my research-report, to manage variability in modeling choreographies, which we can obtain systematically a behavioural interface defined in BPMN.

Besides the proposal, which is based on making use of models of interaction of MaCMAS, adds value to the current proposals for BPMN 2.0 on this field because it allows the management of multiparty interactions, composition of models to automate as far as possible the management of variability, and other benefits explored in the work of my colleague Jose Bocanegra in relation to the obtaining of the specification automatic document the business processes and interactions.

Final version of paper comming soon ...

BPMN Selftest

2009-12-09T02:06:00.000-08:00

Prof. Jan Mendling have launched a new website where people can test their comprehension of BPMN models at http://www.bpmn-selftest.org/. The website is part of a research project of HU Berlin and TU Eindhoven.

Our results are the following: done 23 min. 66.67% correct answers 87.17 per hour Ranking Pos: 13th

MDA Workshop Slides (Spanish)

2009-12-02T04:19:00.001-08:00

MDA, Lineas de Producto y Modelado del Negocio

View more documents from Ildefonso Montero.

The importance of Business Transactions: Business Services 2.0

2009-11-27T04:48:00.000-08:00

My research partners, Joaquin Peña and Jose Bocanegra, are currently working on improve the modeling and implementation of business transactions, using MDD and SOC. Their contributions are in businessservices20.com

Business transactions are acquiring a special importance because provide an abstract view of the interactions that take place among organizations for the accomplishment of a business objective.

Although business transactions are seen as one of the key elements for making the Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) vision a reality, we have discovered, through an initial review of the literature, that the proposals for the modelling of business transactions have a set of weakness that can be synthesized in the following two drawbacks: on the one hand, there is important information that business transactions models should expose to cover the information need from a economical and software point of view, but that is not taken into account in the proposed models, limiting its expressiveness. On the other hand, there is not a proposal for the automatic transformation of those models into an executable system.

CAISE 2010 paper available (under revision)

2009-11-27T04:45:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, we have performed the submission of our paper: "A Methodological Framework for Obtaining the Core Architecture of Business Information Systems Families" to CAISE 2010.

Abstract: Nowadays large organizations are the result of the interrelation of many business units which tend to be managed based on its business processes. The development of the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure that supports these organizations is a complex task, due to the existence of diﬀerent versions of the same process, namely core process, tailored in terms of each unit that executes it. Thus, organizations lost the matching between each version and the original. It implies problems in the maintenance of process speciﬁcations, that drives to an inaccurate execution of the business strategies of the organization. The introduction of Software Product Lines (SPL) techniques into the development of Business Information Systems (BIS) is expected to become a new development paradigm, of what we call Business Families, maximizing reuse and dealing with variability on process deﬁnitions. Current SPL-based proposals do not solve the identiﬁed problems, because the proposed design of the reusable core speciﬁcation is not performed in a systematic way that maintains its traceability with derived processes. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a methodological framework that taking into account the identiﬁed drawbacks makes feasible to obtain, systematically, the core architecture of a Business Information System Family, composed by the core process and the extra information needed to derive, systematically too, each version. We exemplify our approach with reference to a real-life E-Government case study.

BPM 2010 CfP

2009-11-27T04:40:00.000-08:00

BPM'10 is the 8th Conference on Business Process Management and it is considered the most distinguished specialized forum for researchers in BPM.

Call for papers

More info ...

We are referenced as a bibliography on new research projects

2009-11-27T04:30:00.000-08:00

We are very proud to know that our article From Feature Models to Business Processes has been referenced in the recommended bibliography of proposed work: Modelagem de Variabilidade em Processos de Negócio at the University of Pernambuco by Carina Frota Alves

E-Goverment Case Study

2009-10-29T03:21:00.000-07:00

This case study focuses on the application of the Business Family Engineering (BFE) approach in the context of developing a family of processes intended to support E-administration tasks. For that purpose, we focus on the study of a defined set of administrative procedures so telematics in the context of general government. Specifically, the objective of this case study is to evaluate the feasibility of BFE for the reuse of these definitions in several public entities.

Andalussian Goverment defined, in context of the project W@ndA, a set of telematic procedures that are based in both legal and technological framework strong enough. Due to the need for compliance with Law 11/2007, University of Seville has begun the development of the definition of its procedures in telematics and evaluates the possibility to reuse part or all of the framework defined by the Andalussian Goverment.

Once the requirements specification document is defined, we will obtain the variability summary and the basic business process core specificacion. Subsequently, defined by means of choreography modelling, the collaboration scenarios for the family will be obtained.

Next step is to explore how many business process specifications from core will be used by the University of Seville. For that purpose we explore its commonality percentage and redesign the core for this instance (such as Application Engineering in the SPL field). Finally, we detect that only Digital Authentication and Digital Signature business process definitions will be reused.

In our final definition we can see that several existing elements, business processes and software applications from Andalussian Goverment framework can be reused.

Eclipse BPMN Modeler Webminar

2009-10-06T03:19:00.000-07:00

Abstract: The BPMN modeler is a pure Eclipse product. Its semantic model is based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework, it uses the Graphical Modeling Framework to run its editor. It has quite a few more things bundled into it though - we made sure to add a validation builder that creates markers on invalid BPMN diagrams headlessly. We also tweaked and configured the modeler against GMF so we could use the best of the tools it provides. The BPMN modeler is also meant to be embedded into your product. It features a simple drag and drop mechanism to annotate the diagram shapes. It is specifically oriented to be rebranded and integrated into complex products.

The webinar will present the BPMN language, the BPMN modeler features, and will detail some of its little additions.

Total running time 49:13 minutes

http://live.eclipse.org/node/657

PhD Research Report Camera Ready

2009-09-30T01:12:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I presented my PhD Research Report in the context of the PhD programme: "Technology and Software Engineering" in the Dpt. Languages and Computer Systems of University of Seville.

These are the final camera ready version of my report and slides.

PhD Research Report (Camera Ready Version)

View more documents from Ildefonso Montero.

Slides (Final Version) (20 minutes of presentation)

View more documents from Ildefonso Montero.

Obtaining service compositions using WSMO from feature models

2009-09-01T02:40:00.000-07:00

Our paper From Feature Models to Business Processes has been cited in a paper from SPLC 09. Concretely in the paper titled:

Semantic Variability Modeling for Multi-staged Service Composition. Bardia Mohabbati, Nima Kaviani and Dragan Gasevic.

The main goal of this work is to show how transformation of feature models to ontologies coupled with constraints over configuring products can help with reasoning over a product family and creating adaptive service compositions.

For that purpose, authors provide a complete description of service compositions using WSMO, from a previous feature model that describes configuration. This transformation is done by following the mapping rules between the feature models and abstract state machines defined in our work.

A copy of this paper is available in the website of Nima Kaviani.

Signavio Web Process Editor and jBPM integration

2009-09-01T02:29:00.000-07:00

Signavio is a company that provides a web process editor based on the open source project Oryx Editor.

Some time ago that I keep track on these guys and their amazing work, but today I´m glad to know tha announcement that the integration between Signavio and jBoss JBPM is ready.

See the following screencast that is a preview of this integration using the JBPM test functionality

More news about Signavio in its Twitter channel: http://twitter.com/signavio

Why I need BFE ?

2009-08-28T05:17:00.000-07:00

We are currently writing an article for CAISE 2010, where BFE is presented as a methodological solution to address all the problems that our poor business process consultant has to address ... coming soon.

Business Family Domain Requirements Engineering defined by Eclipse Process Framework

2009-07-07T01:57:00.000-07:00

Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) Composer is the best solution for defining customizable software processes by means of SPEM 2.0.

I'm using this tool for defining the BFE methodology fragment. Concretely, I have defined the Business Family Domain Requirement Engineering step, and this is the result

PhD Research Report Camera Ready

2009-06-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

PhD Research Report Camera Ready

CFP II PNIS Workshop 2009

2009-05-18T07:29:00.000-07:00

-- CFP -- (In Spanish)

II Taller sobre Procesos de Negocio e Ingeniería de Servicios (PNIS 2009) en el marco de las XIV Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos (JISBD)
San Sebastián, 8 de septiembre de 2009

http://www.isa.us.es/pnis2009

ALCANCE Y MOTIVACIÓN

Los sistemas software son, cada vez más, piezas para dar soporte de automatización a los procesos de negocio (PN) de las organizaciones. Las organizaciones necesitan adaptarse de forma rápida a los cambios, y por ello, la tecnología y métodos relacionados con los procesos de negocio, englobadas dentro de lo que se conoce como gestión de procesos de negocio (Business Process Management, BPM), están llamados a ser una pieza clave en la competitividad de las organizaciones.

Por otro lado, la ingeniería de servicios está adquiriendo una importancia cada vez más significativa tanto en el mundo empresarial en general como en el mundo del software en particular. Ambas disciplinas (procesos de negocio e ingeniería de servicios) están claramente relacionadas: los procesos de negocio pueden servir para detallar cómo realizar un servicio por parte de una empresa, mientras que los servicios pueden servir para llevar a cabo algunas de las actividades definidas en el proceso de negocio.

Por todo esto, el campo de la ingeniería del software necesita incorporar el estudio y manejo de los procesos de negocio y su relación con la ingeniería de servicios así como con otros conceptos de ingeniería del software como los requisitos, el desarrollo dirigido por modelos, etc. para abordar los retos que plantea el desarrollo de software en este contexto.

OBJETIVOS

El objetivo principal del taller es avanzar en la convergencia entre la tecnología de procesos de negocio y la reciente propuesta de ingeniería de servicios, ésta ultima desde el punto de vista integrador y multidisciplinar conocido como SME (Service Science, Management and Engineering). Se trata por tanto de un taller con vocación de consolidar una comunidad dedicada a la aplicación de la ingeniería del software tanto a la tecnología de procesos de negocio como a la ciencia e ingeniería de los servicios.

FORMATO DEL WORKSHOP

Pretendemos que el taller tenga un carácter muy interactivo. Con este fin, cada sesión se organizará para animar la discusión entre el ponente del artículo, los discussant y el resto de los participantes del taller.

Después de la presentación de un artículo, éste será discutido por dos discussants designados previamente, después la discusión se extenderá al resto de los participantes del artículo. Además, cada sesión se cerrará por una discusión general de todos los artículos presentados en la misma.

TEMAS DE INTERÉS

El taller se organizará de forma abierta, buscando contribuciones de distinta naturaleza: plantear problemas comunes, analizar soluciones existentes, identificar retos y cambios que se avecinan, etc. Entre otras, algunas cuestiones que se pretenden abordar son:

* ¿Por qué a los expertos en ingeniería del software les deben interesar los PN?
* ¿Cómo se pueden explotar las técnicas de MDA/MDD en el contexto de los Procesos de Negocio?
* ¿Cómo debemos abordar la perspectiva de procesos frente a la perspectiva de sistemas, tradicional en ingeniería del software?
* ¿Qué papel está llamada a jugar la tecnología BPMS (business process management systems) en la automatización de las organizaciones?
* ¿Cómo analizar la conformidad de los procesos de negocio con respecto a estándares, normativas, modelos de calidad?
* ¿Cómo afecta la evolución de un PN a la aplicación software que le está dando soporte?
* ¿Qué ventajas ofrece entender el proceso de desarrollo software como un proceso de negocio?
* ¿Qué puede aportar la semantización de los Procesos de Negocio?
* ¿Cómo se puede medir la calidad de un Proceso de Negocio?
* ¿Como se puede integrar la gestión de la arquitectura de servicios con la gestión de procesos de negocios?
* ¿Cómo se definen indicadores (KPIs) sobre un PN y de qué manera se puede analizar y comprobar que estos indicadores están dentro de unos valores previamente definidos?

CONTRIBUCIONES

Las contribuciones pueden ser sobre resultados de trabajos, planteamientos de trabajos que están comenzando o van a comenzar (position papers) o estudios o análisis del estado del arte para intentar responder a algunas de las cuestiones antes planteadas.

El envío se realizará siguiendo las indicaciones de la web del taller. El archivo deberá estar en formato PDF, y no podrá sobrepasar las 8 páginas, aplicando el estilo definido para las JISDB en su página web. El idioma de las contribuciones deberá ser uno de los establecidos para las JISBD (portugués, castellano o inglés).

Todas las contribuciones serán revisadas formalmente por el Comité Técnico para determinar su adecuación a los objetivos del taller.

Las contribuciones aceptadas serán publicadas en formato electrónico en la web del taller con antelación suficiente para que todos los participantes puedan leerlas y analizarlas. Además, los trabajos serán publicados por la Sociedad de Ingeniería del Software y Tecnologías de Desarrollo del Software (SISTEDES) en actas electrónicas con ISSN.

Al menos uno de los autores deberá registrarse en el taller para poder presentar su trabajo.

FECHAS IMPORTANTES

26 de junio de 2009. Fecha límite de envío de contribuciones (deadline).
17 de julio de 2009. Notificación de aceptación.
24 de julio de 2009. Versión definitiva de contribuciones
8 de septiembre de 2009. Celebración del taller.

ORGANIZACIÓN

Antonio Ruiz y Manuel Resinas (Grupo ISA, Universidad de Sevilla).
Francisco Ruiz y Félix García (Grupo Alarcos, Universidad de Castilla-La
Mancha).

COMITÉ DE PROGRAMA

* Acuña, Silvia T. (Univ. Autónoma de Madrid)
* Canós, Jose Hilario (Univ. Politécnica de Valencia)
* Cardoso, Jorge (SAP Research, Germany)
* De Castro, Maria Valeria (Univ. Rey Juan Carlos)
* De Lara, Juan (Univ. Autónoma de Madrid)
* Durán, Amador (Univ. de Sevilla)
* Franch, Xavier (Univ. Politécnica de Catalunya)
* Lopez Cobo, Jose M. (XimetriX)
* Murillo, Juan Manuel (Univ. Extremadura)
* Parra, Carlos (Junta de Andalucía)
* Pedreira, Óscar (Univ. Coruña)
* Pelechano, Vicente (Univ. Politécnica de Valencia)
* Peña, Joaquín (Univ. de Sevilla)
* Ramos, Isidro (Univ. Politécnica de Valencia)

Para información adicional contactar con Manuel Resinas (resinas@us.es).

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How many models are necessary in BFE?

2009-05-18T03:24:00.000-07:00

One of the most quoted questions is about the total number of models that a process engineer must develop. The answer is only two:

The variability summary, defined by means of feature modeling, is the following:

Next, we apply the transformation catalogue defined and obtain the following free-context BPMN representation (this model is obtained automatically.)

The choreography model, in order to provide the specific definition by means of the choreography model defined by means of MaCMAS mRI models

Research report slides (Spanish)

2009-05-06T04:04:00.001-07:00

Montero Dea

View more presentations from ildefonso.montero.

ICCBSS Poster

2009-04-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

ICCBSS 08 Poster: Representing Runtime Variability in Business Driven-Development Systems. (Click to enlarge)

A previous entry of this publication was made. Here is the complete paper.

Research Report Available

2009-03-02T02:38:00.000-08:00

Download my PhD Research Report in pdf format

Call 4 Reviews

Any revision would be appreciated on my PhD research report. The minimum requirements of the reviewers should be only two: knowledge of English, and some sort of experience (academic and / or professional) in the world of computing. Please feel free to send me back your reviews as comments in this entry.

Thanks in advance,

Defining ATL model to model transformation from mRIs to BPMN

2009-02-16T03:06:00.000-08:00

In a previous post we propose an ATL model to model transformation catalog from MultiRole Interaction models ( defined by the UML profile of MaCMAS proposal ) to BPMN. By now, a template pattern for this catalog has been defined, as shown in the following picture.

In this template pattern we define: (i) the input MultiRole Interaction model; (ii) its equivalent in BPMN; and (iii) the ATL code that defines the m2m transformation. A first step for this m2m transformation has been proposed in this paper (in spanish) for modelling business transactions.

BPM'09 CfP - Universität Ulm, Germany

2009-02-13T11:08:00.000-08:00

BPM'09 is the 7th Conference on Business Process Management and it is considered the most distinguished specialized forum for researchers in BPM.

Call for papers

More info ...

Publications

2009-02-13T04:59:00.000-08:00

During my research work some preliminary contributions were made. The main purpose of this entry is to provide a brief summary of those contributions.

International Conferences

- From Feature Models to Business Processes: I. Montero, J. Peña, A. Ruiz-Cortés. IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SSC). 2605–608. Honolulu, HI. 2008
Quality Levels: Acceptance Rate: 18%, IEEE Core: A

- Representing Runtime Variability in Business-Driven Development Systems: I. Montero, J. Peña, A. Ruiz-Cortés. 7th IEEE Int. Conf. on Composition-Based Software Systems (ICCBSS). 228–231. Madrid, Spain. 2008.
Quality Levels: Acceptance Rate: 33%, IEEE Core: B

- Representing Runtime Variability in Business-Driven Development Systems - Poster: I. Montero, J. Peña, A. Ruiz-Cortés. 7th IEEE Int. Conf. on Composition-Based Software Systems (ICCBSS). 241. Madrid, Spain. 2008.
Quality Levels: Acceptance Rate: 33%, IEEE Core: B

International Workshops

- Towards Visualisation and Analysis of Runtime Variability in Execution Time of Business Information Systems based on Product Lines: I. Montero, J. Peña, A. Ruiz-Cortés. 2nd. International Workshop on Variability Modelling of Software-intensive Systems (VAMOS). 151–160. Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany. 2008.

- Business Family Engineering. Managing The Evolution Of Business-Driven Systems: I. Montero, J. Peña, A. Ruiz-Cortés. IEEE Computer Society 1st International Workshop on Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPL 2007, Volume 1), in conjunction with SPLC07, 33-40, Kyoto, Japan, 2007.

National Workshops

- Business Family Engineering. Does it make sense?: I. Montero, J. Peña, A. Ruiz-Cortés. Actas de los Talleres de las Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos (JISBD). 1er Taller de Procesos de Negocio e Ingeniería del Software (PNIS). II Congreso Español de Informática (CEDI 2007). Pag. 34-40, Zaragoza, España. 2007.

Dealing with Variability on Modeling Choreographies on Business Families

2009-02-10T04:08:00.000-08:00

In Service-Oriented Computing (SOC), choreography models are acquiring a special importance. A choreography lists all possible interactions between a set of business partners, together with the behavioral constraints between them. Thus, choreography models represents the observable behaviour of business partners defined by means of interaction contracts. In addition, the introduction of Software Product Lines (SPL) techniques into the development of Business Information Systems (BIS) is expected to become a new development paradigm, of what we call Business Family, maximizing reuse and dealing with variability on business process definitions, including the notion of interacting processes. However, current proposals for modeling these interactions, by means of choreography models, does not provide any support for introducing these variability aspects. The contribution of this work is two-fold: in the one hand, we propose a choreography model based on an UML2 profile used on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) field that makes feasible the variability support; and in the other hand we provide a transformation between this choreography model and BPMN elements for improving the design of business families, by means of the Business Family Engineering (BFE) approach.

The AOSE profile used in this approach is the MaCMAS profile. We define the Order Trip choreography (WSCI specification example) by means of the mRI models provided by means of this AOSE approach, as shown in Figure:

Next, we apply the following model to model transformation catalog (under construction, a final proposal of this catalog will be published):

And finally we obtain the expected results:

Next step is to provide a new transformation rule for obtaining the choreography models proposed by the BPMN 1.2 draft specification:

Tooling Business Family Engineering

2009-02-10T03:57:00.000-08:00

Nowadays, we have developed an automated tool support for obtaining the basic structure of a BPMN derived from the commonalities summary into the Business Family Domain Engineering phase. This basic structure is the Core Process Framework. This mapping is based on Automata Theory and Formal Languages, and it has been implemented by means of MDD transformations.

For that purpose, we have performed a transformation between the FeAture Model Analyzer (FAMA) metamodel as source and the Eclipse SOA Tool Platform2 BPMN metamodel as target metamodel using the Atlas Transformation Language (ATL).

Figure presents and screenshot of this tool. It has been published on Eclipse ATL website. ATL code and specification is available in http://www.eclipse.org/m2m/atl/atlTransformations/#FM2BPMN

The transformation was introduced at the following paper:

From Feature Models to Business Processes: I. Montero, J. Peña, A. Ruiz-Cortés. IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SSC). 2605–608. Honolulu, HI. 2008.

Abstract: The variability level of average-size Business Information Systems (BIS) is highly enough for making the design of this kind of systems a complex task. There is an approach called Process Family Engineering (PFE) that tries to ease the design of BIS using ideas from the Software Product Lines (SPL) field. Roughly speaking, they propose to, first, study the variability of the system without entering into details by means of building a variability model (called feature model), that is used later for building the business process. However, in PFE the process of deriving the business process from the feature model is performed manually.
Authors use feature models with a different meaning that is commonly accepted in SPL. In this paper, we provide a rigorous description for the new meaning of feature models, and a mapping relationship that defines how to use the information in the FM for obtaining the basic structure of the business process. In addition, as a proof of concepts, we have implemented an MDD transformation that provides the expected results.

Quality Levels: Acceptance Rate: 18%, IEEE Core: A

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1444336
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4578594

Business Family Engineering Overview (3/3)

2009-02-10T03:43:00.000-08:00

The Domain Design activity is focused on performing a variability summary of the set of businesses identified at the previous step and on providing the core architecture of the product line. Figure shows the Domain Design overview.

Business Family Engineering Overview (2/3)

2009-02-10T03:39:00.000-08:00

The Domain Requirements Engineering activity is focused on identifying the set of companies and its business processes that would be members of the business family. This step takes into account the traditional requirements elicitation activities of software engineering, and provides as resulting artifact the documents that reflects this elicitation, where it is included the definition of each business process and each company. Thus, the activities of this stage are performed by a Requirement Engineer, role that could be played by an analist, a process engineer, etc.
Figure shows the Domain Requirements Engineering overview.

Business Family Engineering Overview (1/3)

2009-02-10T03:25:00.000-08:00

The main motivation of my research is: (i) to propose a methodology based on applying SPL ideas for the systematization of the development of BIS across a several number of businesses that shares common business processes, namely Business Family Engineering (BFE); and (ii) to de¯ne the methodology fragment focused on providing a core architecture of the family, namely Business Family Domain Engineering. For that purpose, this figure shows the software process of
our approach using the SPEM notation (http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/spem.htm)

As shown in Figure, in this software process there are two main activities: (i) Business Family Domain Engineering, where we build the BFE core architecture, namely Core Process Framework, and the Business Family Variaability Summary; and (ii) Business Family Application Engineering, where we obtain specific business information systems, that are described by means of execution languages, such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). It is important to say that our scenario is by now limited to binary relationships between features and processes, in other words, a feature can not represent a set of processes.
In addition, we have identified two diferent ways to build a business family: top-down and bottom-up. In the top-down approach, we define the set of businesses and processes from scratch and apply the normal sequence of BFE software process. In bottom-up approach, we can not apply the normal sequence of the software process defined due to we have a set of businesses or processes defined in feature models previously to apply BFE software process. In our research we only focus in top-down.

Next figure describes the Business Family Domain Engineering software process using SPEM. It is composed by three diferent activities: (i) Domain Requirements Engineering, that is focused on capturing the requirements of the problem domain, (ii) Domain Design, that is focused on exploring the variability of the system and providing the core architecture; and (iii) Domain Implementation, that is focused on defining the implementation and test details of the
architecture, such as persistence or presentation layers.

Business Family Engineering

2009-01-02T10:16:00.000-08:00

On the one hand, the development of Business Information Systems is focused on providing techniques and mechanisms fordesigning software systems based on the business processes of the companies.

On the other hand, the Software Product Lines (SPL) field systematizes the reuse across the set of similar products that a software company produces. It implies a reduction of development times and costs and a quality improvement.

My PhD Thesis project is focused on defining a BPM methodology in order to increase the process definitions reusability, based on applying SPL ideas for the systematization of the development of BIS across a several number of businesses that shares common business processes.

About me ...

2009-01-01T05:23:00.000-08:00

Ildefonso Montero Pérez

Organization:

Ingeniería e Integracion Avanzadas (Ingenia) S.A., http://www.ingenia.es

Description:

PhD student in the Technical School of Computer Engineering of the University of Seville. In his studies he is working in business process modelling and management, service-oriented architectures, software product lines and variability models.

In his professional career as consultant and analyst at Ingenia, he is currently working on the e-Government context.

Other projects:

Enterprise Architect Redmine Plugin: https://community.ingenia.es/redmine/wiki/earedmine

References:

https://www.xing.com/profile/Ildefonso_MonteroPerez
http://es.linkedin.com/in/ildefonsomonteroperez

http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/m/Montero:Ildefonso.html

http://investigacion.us.es/sisius/sis_showpub.php?idpers=12508

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=771283768

https://community.ingenia.es/redmine/account/show/4