General research fields and directions of our team
Business Process Management
Business Process Modeling
Quality Assessment of Process Models
Business Process Automation and Process-centric Applications
Enterprise Applications (Components) Design and Development
Business Process Model Repository
Blockchain, Smart Contracts, and Assets Tokenization
Business Intelligence
Analytical Dashboards and Data Visualization
Data Warehousing and OLAP Technologies
Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise Architecture Repository
Storage and Querying of Semantic Enterprise Data (Knowledge)
Business and IT Alignment in Enterprise Architecture
Software Engineering
Databases and Database Management Systems
Translation of Natural Language Business Rules into SQL
Software Applications Architecture Analysis
Design Patterns Recognition and Intelligent Suggestions
Models
Reference business process and other enterprise models of a small trading company
BPMN Business Process Models
The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is visual modeling language for business analysis applications and specifying enterprise process workflows, which is an open standard notation for graphical flowcharts that is used to define business process workflows. It is popular and intuitive graphic that can be easily understand by all business stakeholders, including business users, business analysts, software developers, and data architects. [Referece]
BPMN — APQC PCF (Cross Industry Process Classification Framework)
ARIS Enterprise Models
ARIS (Architecture of Integrated Information Systems) is an approach to enterprise modeling. It offers methods for analyzing processes and taking a holistic view of process design‐management workflow and application processing. The ARIS approach provides a well‐documented, methodological framework for BPM, based on Prof. August Wilhelm Scheer’s research from the 1990s. ARIS uses a modeling language known as Event Driven Process Chain (EPC), which brings multiple aspects of enterprise modeling together using the ARIS House of Business Engineering framework. [Referece]
ArchiMate is The Open Group‘s open and independent modelling language for enterprise architecture, supported by different tool vendors and consulting firms. ArchiMate provides instruments to support enterprise architects in describing, analyzing and visualizing the relationships among different architecture domains in an unambiguous way, similar to those well-established disciplines like civil engineering or building and construction using internationally accepted standards for describing their designs.
ArchiMate is a modelling technique (“language”) for describing enterprise architectures. It presents a clear set of concepts within and relationships between architecture domains, and offers a simple and uniform structure for describing the contents of these domains. Just like an architectural drawing in classical building architecture describes the various aspects of the construction and use of a building. [Referece]
Strategy layer
Business layer
Application layer
Technology layer
Physical layer
Implementation & Migration layer
IDEF Business Models Appear later
Integration Definition (IDEF) is a group of modeling languages used to implement systems and engineer software. These languages are used in data functional modeling, simulation, object-oriented analysis, and knowledge acquisition.
The U.S. Air Force (USAF) has assumed the responsibility of funding IDEF since the project launch. IDEF is still used by USAF departments and other military institutions. IDEF is also available in the public domain. IDEF is maintained by Knowledge Based Systems, Inc. and is compatible with manufacturing platforms built during its first launch. Additional software industry applications utilize IDEF on a daily basis.
IDEF includes 16 different methods (IDEF1X, IDEF1, IDEF3, etc.). During the modeling process, each method captures a certain data type. In addition to IDEF’s role in model analysis and creation of a system version, IDEF is useful in translating a system into a graphical form. To simplify model transitions, gap analysis is applied in collaboration with IDEF.
One of the most common IDEF process applications is the application of IDEF0 to the function modeling of any enterprise. This is applied to graphically model its functions’ controls and operators with different resources used within those control processes, their procedures, and various mutual function interactions. [Referece]
Since business process modeling is considered as the foundation of Business Process Management, it is required to design understandable and modifiable process models used to analyze and improve depicted business processes. Therefore, this article proposes
a method for business process model analysis and improvement. The lifecycle of Business Process Management from business process modeling to applying the Business Intelligence and process mining techniques is considered. Existing
approaches to business process model analysis are reviewed. Proposed method is based on best practices in business process modeling, process model metrics, and corresponding thresholds. The usage of business process model metrics
and thresholds to formalize process modeling guidelines is outlined, as well as the procedure of business process model analysis and improvement is shown. The application of Business Intelligence techniques to support the proposed
method is demonstrated.
Business process management has become the most widely-used and reliable approach to organizational management over the last decades. It is also considered as a part of quality management system in an organization. Business process modeling is the core of business process management, which is used for visualization, analysis, and improvement of organizational activities. Moreover, business process modeling plays an important role in the context of business process management maturity of an overall enterprise. Therefore, this paper is focused on the problem of business process model quality evaluation. Existing approaches based on the process modeling guidelines, measures and corresponding thresholds are reviewed, as well as the refined process modeling rules, corresponding quality criteria, the generalized quality criterion, and thresholds for its translation into linguistic values are proposed. The data model and software prototype are developed and the validation results are outlined.
Context. A relevant problem of an approach development used to reduce system or random errors which occur during business process models design is solved. The object of the research includes graphical and mathematical models which describe business process structure. Objective. Minimization of systematic or random errors based on the development of an approach to formation and analysis of a business process structure in IDEF0 notation. Method. The approach to formation and analysis of a business processes structure in IDEF0 notation is proposed. Balancing coefficient, which was modified and augmented, considering weight coefficients of arcs of various types, is used for IDEF0 diagrams analysis. Cohesion types defined in the ISO/IEC/IEEE 2476 standard, which weight coefficients are calculated using their values normalization, are used to define values of arc weight coefficients. Results. The approach to IDEF0 diagrams analysis, which allows defining structural changes of diagrams to satisfy balancing requirements, has been developed. Recommendations obtained as a result of IDEF0 diagrams analysis, which describe product purchase and software release processes, and also recommendations of DevOps concept and SCOR supply chain reference model have been used to transform the source diagrams according to the balancing requirements. Further research may consider using of expert judgments for making decisions on recommendations development. Conclusions. The proposed approach can be used to support activities of collecting, storing, and sharing organizational knowledge allowing to analyze and improve business process models before they are added into an enterprise repository for future reuse to design new solutions. Next studies will consider various approaches to business process models representation in an enterprise repository, corresponding to Archimate, ARIS, and other notations.
Since business process modeling is considered as the foundation of Business Process Management, it is required to design understandable and modifiable process models used to analyze and improve depicted business processes. Therefore, this article proposes a method for business process model analysis and improvement. The lifecycle of Business Process Management from business process modeling to applying the Business Intelligence and process mining techniques is considered. Existing approaches to business process model analysis are reviewed. Proposed method is based on best practices in business process modeling, process model metrics, and corresponding thresholds. The usage of business process model metrics and thresholds to formalize process modeling guidelines is outlined, as well as the procedure of business process model analysis and improvement is shown. The application of Business Intelligence techniques to support the proposed method is demonstrated, as well as the obtained results are shown and discussed.
This paper presents a problem of enterprise architecture artifacts extraction from business process model collections, which organizations of higher maturity levels tend to manage, in order to build the architecture landscape and apply enterprise architecture management practices. Existing enterprise architecture frameworks, languages, and methodologies are discussed. Proposed approach is based on mapping between business process and enterprise architecture elements in order to present all business architecture artifacts in a single coarse-grained model. The software implementation allows generating business architecture landscapes that could be used for architecture evolution purposes, such as transformation planning or maintenance efforts evaluation.
This article considers development of the approach to forming dashboards for business process indicators analysis. The approach idea is based on the dashboard design problem, outlined in analyzed works, which propose a lot of recommendations and best practices, but have a lack of formal approaches to dashboard design definition for specific business process indicators. This study considers application of fuzzy and semantic technologies in order to provide description and analysis of relations between analyzed business process indicators, indicator’s types, and visualization tools. It also considers event log processing of a workflow system, used to execute business processes, which indicators are measured. As a result of implementation and application of the proposed approach, recommendations for a dashboard’s design, based on specific business processes and their performance indicators to be analyzed, can be obtained and implemented. The theoretical essentials, workflow scheme, and early results of the proposed approach are given, future research is outlined.
This paper considers a problem of dashboard design in order to improve data analytics and decision making as business intelligence capabilities. Essentials of data warehouses and data marts used as data sources for business intelligence activities are briefly outlined, and the star schema data structure is considered as the most widely used. Data visualization is considered from the perspective of proper visualization graphs and charts selection. It is extremely vital for designed dashboards, since inappropriate visuals may mislead users and shift their focus to wrong things. Bar charts, line charts, and pie charts are considered as the most common visualization graphs. Proposed approach includes two phases: dataset preparation and dataset analysis. While dataset preparation is mostly focused on star schema transformation into flat structures, dataset analysis phase proposes recommendations on which visualizations may be placed on a designed dashboard. In order to propose such recommendations, threshold values of dataset sizes are used. A dashboard design process, which is considered as the baseline of the proposed dashboard design approach, is outlined. Sample dataset in considered, five data subsets are prepared and recommendations on visualization charts for these datasets, which may be placed on a dashboard, are proposed. Obtained results are discussed, conclusions are made, as well as the further research objectives in this field are formulated.
In the recent decades, databases have been used in any field of human activity to keep valuable data about ongoing processes. Large amounts of data stored in enterprise databases are useless without having a specialized software tool for data discovery or querying. Most business users that make data-driven decisions usually do not have special training and experience in database querying using special formal languages. Existing solutions are based on “query wizards” and database query forms that require knowledge of a database schema and inconvenient for users without special training. Proposed approach is based on the content-based filtering of already executed queries by usage frequency and similarity criteria in order to suggest relevant queries that may be re-used. It is a baseline of the interactive adaptive system for data analysis, which design and development is outlined in this study. Software prototype was demonstrated and its usage was discussed. Conclusions were made and future research was formulated.
Business process management has become the most widely-used and reliable approach to organizational management over the last decades. It is also considered as a part of quality management system in an organization. Business process modeling is the core of business process management, which is used for visualization, analysis, and improvement of organizational activities. Moreover, business process modeling plays an important role in the context of business process management maturity of an overall enterprise. Therefore, this paper is focused on the problem of business process model quality evaluation. Existing approaches based on business process modeling guidelines, measures, and their thresholds are considered. Refined business process modeling rules, measures, quality criteria of numerical and linguistic values, and a method for evaluation of business process model quality are proposed. The corresponding information technology is designed and implemented, and results of its usage are outlined.
In the recent decades data has indeed become one of the most valuable assets for government institutions, private businesses, and individual persons. Nowadays almost any software, from social networks and dating mobile applications to large information systems and analytical services for enterprise management, accumulates, stores, and processes data to solve certain problems in their subject areas. Extremely large data volumes are organized in databases that are used as the baseline for almost all of modern software applications. As the most important components of software systems, databases should be carefully designed, since drawbacks at the stage of requirements elicitation may result in exponential growth of defects fixing costs at testing and maintenance phases. Therefore, this study proposes an approach and software tool to database schema generation from textual requirements also known in database design domain as business rules. This may help database designers to rapidly obtain usable database schemas in order to detect and fix defects as early as possible. Moreover, proposed solution may simplify the database design process, since database creation scripts are generated from business rules directly. Thus, instead of coding all the required statements, engineers are only need to check obtained schema and make certain adjustments to data types, unique attributes, or used naming style. This research considers relational model and relational databases, since they are most widely used nowadays. State-of-the-art analysis is made, proposed approach is described in details, software tool with its brief usage examples is described, conclusions are made, and further research directions are formulated.
This paper proposes an approach to the organization of a decentralized business process model repository to provide a secure and stable software solution for keeping and accessing business process model collections. State-of-the-art studies consider the problem of managing large collections of business process models as an extremely complex challenge, whereas the security and integrity of such corporate knowledge assets are crucial features of repository software. Today blockchain technologies are used not only as ledgers of financial transactions, but also as general-purpose distributed databases that provide high-level security, integrity, and availability. Thus, organizations may benefit from using blockchain platforms and knowledgesharing protocols built on top of them. Therefore, in this paper, we consider the problem of decentralized blockchain-based business process model repository development using smart contract and decentralized application technologies. Presented software prototype of limited functionality is developed on top of the Ethereum test network, accessible using the single page Web3 application. Developed software prototype is validated, obtained results are discussed, the conclusion is made, and the future work is formulated.
Business process modeling helps organizations to capture their workflows visually as diagrams that could be then used to share best practices, identify inefficiencies in ongoing activities, instruct employees, use them as reference solutions, etc. Design and analysis of business process models are essential technologies of the Business Process Management approach, which is successfully adopted and practiced nowadays by many large and medium enterprises. Therefore, business process models should be considered as organizational assets that depict usable and competitive business solutions, which value could be proven by benchmarking. Single reference business process models or even collections of business process models are already accessible on Internet, sometimes for free or, usually, for purchasing because of the value of transferred knowledge. However, peer-to-peer exchange of business process models on a commercial basis is still far from a unification. At the same time, the tremendous growth of the cryptocurrency market and the adoption of Bitcoin by governments (first by El Salvador in June 2021) makes crypto-economics, also referred to as “tokenomics”, usable for organizational knowledge sharing and exchanging without third party authorities, such as banks, or payment systems. Moreover, collaborating parties could reach a consensus when exchanging business process models using smart contracts and crypto-tokens to access shared knowledge artifacts. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach to business process model tokenization using blockchain technology and smart contracts. There was proposed as an Ethereum smart contract that combines features of the business process model collection and the non-fungible token. A prototype of a decentralized application was developed and its usage was demonstrated.
This paper proposes an approach to automatic source code generation driven by business rules. This approach is inspired by low-code and automatic programming to improve the software development process and accelerate product delivery through the source code generation from natural language statements. The proposed approach considers business rules as input, uses the triplestore model for knowledge representation based on business rules, utilizes association rules to suggest attribute data types, and produces an abstract data model. This abstract data model is a framework for software components generation of various purposes and syntax, such as SQL scripts for database tables creation and Java Beans for server-side implementation. A software solution based on the proposed approach translates the data model into the source code of software components: MySQL database and Java classes. But it can be extended to generate various software components based on different syntax rules. Performed experiments demonstrate that generated software components are verified and valid since they were checked using static code analysis and dynamic testing. Conclusion formulates research outcomes, obtained results, and limitations. Future work outlines the next research steps in this field.
This paper considers business process model structuredness issues, which are mostly related to inaccurate usage of gateways. According to related work in the process model structuredness domain, split gateways ought to match respective join gateways of the same type, while the existing mismatch measure allows evaluating model structuredness only by degrees of split and join gateways. Thus, the current measure of process model structuredness is not accurate enough and process model shortcomings may remain undetected, which may affect negatively model understandability, maintainability, and increase the error probability of business process models. Hence, error fixing costs may grow exponentially during later stages of the information system lifecycle. Therefore, we have proposed an improved gateway mismatch measure and a model to detect design issues and suggest changes necessary to achieve a sufficient level of business process model structuredness. The software tool for business process model structuredness analysis was developed to perform experiments with a large set of business process models of different industries. Analysis of obtained results, including sample business process models, detected design issues, and estimated efforts and cost-saving benefits are outlined. Conclusions were made, and future work was formulated.
This paper considers issues of business process model structuredness, which are mostly related to inaccurate usage of gateways. According to related work in a business process model structuredness domain, split gateways ought to match respective join gateways of the same type, while the existing mismatch measure allows evaluating model structuredness only by degrees of split and join gateways. Thus, the current measure of process model structuredness is not accurate enough and business process model shortcomings could remain undetected, which negatively impacts model understandability, maintainability, and may increase the error probability of business process models. Therefore, error fixing effort and related expenses may grow exponentially during later stages of the information system lifecycle. Hence, we have proposed an improved gateway mismatch measure, a model to detect business process modeling errors and formulate recommendations to achieve sound models, and a model for effort estimation of business process modeling error fixing. An information technology for detection and fixing effort estimation of business process modeling errors was designed and implemented to perform experiments with a large set of business process models that belong to different industries. Sample business process models that were used for calculations are demonstrated, as well as obtained results are analyzed and discussed. Conclusion and future work are formulated.
There are two purposes of business process modeling. Business process models are created by business analysts for understanding, analysis, and improvement of process scenarios, search, and elimination of weak spots and bottlenecks in organizational activities. Another purpose of business process models is the requirements engineering in software development projects. In both cases, the quality of created business process models is the core issue. Poor models are similar to text documents written with mistakes – they are not understandable, which may negatively impact the real processes they represent and the software workflows they describe. However, existing studies in the field of business process model quality mostly focus on the structural analysis of models using size, complexity, and other metrics with thresholds, while the textual analysis of activity labels is omitted. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an approach to the analysis of business process model understandability taking into account best practices of activity labeling. The proposed approach includes the use of natural language processing techniques, so the respective software tool was developed to perform experiments with a set of business process models. According to obtained results, we suggest considering both textual and structural qualities to achieve the understandability of business process models due to the bad correlation between these metrics (0.0171) – well-structured models can have unclear activity labels and vice versa.
This paper considers the enterprise architecture model extraction from organizational websites in an automatic way to simplify the blueprinting of enterprise architecture landscapes at the conceptual level. Thus, such a technique is proposed to be called “enterprise architecture web mining”. Nowadays almost all organizations offer their products and services through their websites, therefore, representing their value-creating business processes on the Internet. Thus, enterprise homepages can be considered as sources of business information sufficient to understand the company’s business processes landscape and make further decisions depending on the party that uses such information. The proposed approach includes two major stages of business activity detection using hyperlinks of the company’s webpage that could represent triggers of certain e-commerce business processes, and enterprise architecture model creation based on the obtained data. The software implementation of the proposed approach uses natural language processing to detect business activities on the corporate web pages and produces human-readable enterprise architecture models that describe business processes offered by examined organizations and supportive application and technology environment. Obtained models represent knowledge about primary business activities conducted by organizations and could be used for decisionmaking. As the result, the enterprise architecture landscapes were built for several organizations using only their publicly available websites. The limitations are discussed, the conclusion is made, and future work in this field is formulated.
This article considers development of the approach to forming dashboards for business process indicators analysis. The approach idea is based on the dashboard design problem, outlined in analyzed works, which propose a lot of recommendations and best practices, but have a lack of formal approaches to dashboard design definition for specific business process indicators. This study considers application of fuzzy and semantic technologies in order to provide description and analysis of relations between analyzed business process indicators, indicator’s types, and visualization tools. It also considers event log processing of a workflow system, used to execute business processes, which indicators are measured. As a result of implementation and application of the proposed approach, recommendations for a dashboard’s design, based on specific business processes and their performance indicators to be analyzed, can be obtained and implemented. The theoretical essentials, workflow scheme, and early results of the proposed approach are given, future research is outlined.
Since business process modeling is considered as the foundation of Business Process Management, it is required to design understandable and modifiable process models used to analyze and improve depicted business processes. Therefore, this article proposes a method for business process model analysis and improvement. The lifecycle of Business Process Management from business process modeling to applying the Business Intelligence and process mining techniques is considered. Existing approaches to business process model analysis are reviewed. Proposed method is based on best practices in business process modeling, process model metrics, and corresponding thresholds. The usage of business process model metrics and thresholds to formalize process modeling guidelines is outlined, as well as the procedure of business process model analysis and improvement is shown. The application of Business Intelligence techniques to support the proposed method is demonstrated.
This paper presents a problem of enterprise architecture artifacts extraction from business process model collections, which organizations of higher maturity levels tend to manage, in order to build the architecture landscape and apply enterprise architecture management practices. Existing enterprise architecture frameworks, languages, and methodologies are discussed. Proposed approach is based on mapping between business process and enterprise architecture elements in order to present all business architecture artifacts in a single coarse-grained model. The software implementation allows generating business architecture landscapes that could be used for architecture evolution purposes, such as transformation planning or maintenance efforts evaluation.
Business process management has become the most widely-used and reliable approach to organizational management over the last decades. It is also considered as a part of quality management system in an organization. Business process modeling is the core of business process management, which is used for visualization, analysis, and improvement of organizational activities. Moreover, business process modeling plays an important role in the context of business process management maturity of an overall enterprise. Therefore, this paper is focused on the problem of business process model quality evaluation. Existing approaches based on the process modeling guidelines, measures and corresponding thresholds are reviewed, as well as the refined process modeling rules, corresponding quality criteria, the generalized quality criterion, and thresholds for its translation into linguistic values are proposed. The data model and software prototype are developed and the validation results are outlined.
This paper considers a problem of dashboard design in order to improve data analytics and decision making as business intelligence capabilities. Essentials of data warehouses and data marts used as data sources for business intelligence activities are briefly outlined, and the star schema data structure is considered as the most widely used. Data visualization is considered from the perspective of proper visualization graphs and charts selection. It is extremely vital for designed dashboards, since inappropriate visuals may mislead users and shift their focus to wrong things. Bar charts, line charts, and pie charts are considered as the most common visualization graphs. Proposed approach includes two phases: dataset preparation and dataset analysis. While dataset preparation is mostly focused on star schema transformation into flat structures, dataset analysis phase proposes recommendations on which visualizations may be placed on a designed dashboard. In order to propose such recommendations, threshold values of dataset sizes are used. A dashboard design process, which is considered as the baseline of the proposed dashboard design approach, is outlined. Sample dataset in considered, five data subsets are prepared and recommendations on visualization charts for these datasets, which may be placed on a dashboard, are proposed. Obtained results are discussed, conclusions are made, as well as the further research objectives in this field are formulated.
In the recent decades, databases have been used in any field of human activity to keep valuable data about ongoing processes. Large amounts of data stored in enterprise databases are useless without having a specialized software tool for data discovery or querying. Most business users that make data-driven decisions usually do not have special training and experience in database querying using special formal languages. Existing solutions are based on “query wizards” and database query forms that require knowledge of a database schema and inconvenient for users without special training. Proposed approach is based on the content-based filtering of already executed queries by usage frequency and similarity criteria in order to suggest relevant queries that may be re-used. It is a baseline of the interactive adaptive system for data analysis, which design and development is outlined in this study. Software prototype was demonstrated and its usage was discussed. Conclusions were made and future research was formulated.
In the recent decades data has indeed become one of the most valuable assets for government institutions, private businesses, and individual persons. Nowadays almost any software, from social networks and dating mobile applications to large information systems and analytical services for enterprise management, accumulates, stores, and processes data to solve certain problems in their subject areas. Extremely large data volumes are organized in databases that are used as the baseline for almost all of modern software applications. As the most important components of software systems, databases should be carefully designed, since drawbacks at the stage of requirements elicitation may result in exponential growth of defects fixing costs at testing and maintenance phases. Therefore, this study proposes an approach and software tool to database schema generation from textual requirements also known in database design domain as business rules. This may help database designers to rapidly obtain usable database schemas in order to detect and fix defects as early as possible. Moreover, proposed solution may simplify the database design process, since database creation scripts are generated from business rules directly. Thus, instead of coding all the required statements, engineers are only need to check obtained schema and make certain adjustments to data types, unique attributes, or used naming style. This research considers relational model and relational databases, since they are most widely used nowadays. State-of-the-art analysis is made, proposed approach is described in details, software tool with its brief usage examples is described, conclusions are made, and further research directions are formulated.
This paper considers business process model structuredness issues, which are mostly related to inaccurate usage of gateways. According to related work in the process model structuredness domain, split gateways ought to match respective join gateways of the same type, while the existing mismatch measure allows evaluating model structuredness only by degrees of split and join gateways. Thus, the current measure of process model structuredness is not accurate enough and process model shortcomings may remain undetected, which may affect negatively model understandability, maintainability, and increase the error probability of business process models. Hence, error fixing costs may grow exponentially during later stages of the information system lifecycle. Therefore, we have proposed an improved gateway mismatch measure and a model to detect design issues and suggest changes necessary to achieve a sufficient level of business process model structuredness. The software tool for business process model structuredness analysis was developed to perform experiments with a large set of business process models of different industries. Analysis of obtained results, including sample business process models, detected design issues, and estimated efforts and cost-saving benefits are outlined. Conclusions were made, and future work was formulated.
This paper proposes an approach to the organization of decentralized business process model repository in order to provide a secure and stable software solution for keeping and accessing business process model collections. State-of-the-art studies consider the problem of managing large collections of business process models as an extremely complex challenge, whereas the security and integrity of such corporate knowledge assets are crucial features of repository software. Today blockchain technologies are used not only as ledgers of financial transactions, but also as general-purpose distributed databases that provide high-level security, integrity, and availability. Thus, organizations may benefit from using blockchain platforms and knowledgesharing protocols built on top of them. Therefore, in this paper, we consider the problem of decentralized blockchain-based business process model repository development using smart contract and decentralized application technologies. Presented software prototype of limited functionality is developed on top of the Ethereum test network, accessible using the single page Web3 application. Developed software prototype is validated, obtained results are discussed, the conclusion is made, and the future work is formulated.
Business process modeling helps organizations to capture their workflows in a visual manner as diagrams that could be then used to share best practices, identify inefficiencies in ongoing activities, instruct employees, use as reference solutions etc. Design and analysis of business process models are essential technologies of Business Process Management approach, which is successfully adopted and practiced nowadays by many of large and medium enterprises. Therefore, business process models should be considered as organizational assets that depict usable and competitive business solutions, which value could be proven by benchmarking. Single reference business process models or even collections of business process models are already accessible on Internet, sometimes for free or, usually, for purchasing because of the value of transferred knowledge. However, peer-to-peer exchange of business process models on the commercial basis is still far from a unification. At the same time, tremendous growth of the cryptocurrency market and adoption of Bitcoin by governments (first by El Salvador in June 2021) makes crypto-economics, also referred as “tokenomics”, usable for organizational knowledge sharing and exchanging without third party authorities, such as banks or payment systems. Moreover, collaborating parties could reach consensus when exchanging business process models using smart contracts and crypto-tokens to access shared knowledge artifacts. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach to business process models tokenization using the blockchain technology and smart contracts. There was proposed an Ethereum smart contract that combines features of the business process model collection and the non-fungible token. A prototype of decentralized application was developed and its usage was demonstrated.
This paper proposes an approach to automatic source code generation driven by business rules. This approach is inspired by low-code and automatic programming to improve the software development process and accelerate product delivery through the source code generation from natural language statements. The proposed approach considers business rules as input, uses the triplestore model for knowledge representation based on business rules, utilizes association rules to suggest attribute data types, and produces an abstract data model. This abstract data model is a framework for software components generation of various purposes and syntax, such as SQL scripts for database tables creation and Java Beans for server-side implementation. A software solution based on the proposed approach translates the data model into the source code of software components: MySQL database and Java classes. But it can be extended to generate various software components based on different syntax rules. Performed experiments demonstrate that generated software components are verified and valid since they were checked using static code analysis and dynamic testing. Conclusion formulates research outcomes, obtained results, and limitations. Future work outlines the next research steps in this field.
There are two purposes of business process modeling. Business process models are created by business analysts for understanding, analysis, and improvement of process scenarios, search, and elimination of weak spots and bottlenecks in organizational activities. Another purpose of business process models is the requirements engineering in software development projects. In both cases, the quality of created business process models is the core issue. Poor models are similar to text documents written with mistakes – they are not understandable, which may negatively impact the real processes they represent and the software workflows they describe. However, existing studies in the field of business process model quality mostly focus on the structural analysis of models using size, complexity, and other metrics with thresholds, while the textual analysis of activity labels is omitted. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an approach to the analysis of business process model understandability taking into account best practices of activity labeling. The proposed approach includes the use of natural language processing techniques, so the respective software tool was developed to perform experiments with a set of business process models. According to obtained results, we suggest considering both textual and structural qualities to achieve the understandability of business process models due to the bad correlation between these metrics (0.0171) – well-structured models can have unclear activity labels and vice versa.
This paper considers the enterprise architecture model extraction from organizational websites in an automatic way to simplify the blueprinting of enterprise architecture landscapes at the conceptual level. Thus, such a technique is proposed to be called “enterprise architecture web mining”. Nowadays almost all organizations offer their products and services through their websites, therefore, representing their value-creating business processes on the Internet. Thus, enterprise homepages can be considered as sources of business information sufficient to understand the company’s business processes landscape and make further decisions depending on the party that uses such information. The proposed approach includes two major stages of business activity detection using hyperlinks of the company’s webpage that could represent triggers of certain e-commerce business processes, and enterprise architecture model creation based on the obtained data. The software implementation of the proposed approach uses natural language processing to detect business activities on the corporate web pages and produces human-readable enterprise architecture models that describe business processes offered by examined organizations and supportive application and technology environment. Obtained models represent knowledge about primary business activities conducted by organizations and could be used for decision-making. As the result, the enterprise architecture landscapes were built for several organizations using only their publicly available websites. The limitations are discussed, the conclusion is made, and future work in this field is formulated.
Enterprise Architecture Modeling Support based on Data Extraction from Business Process Models
This paper presents a problem of enterprise architecture artifacts extraction from business process model collections, which organizations of higher maturity levels tend to manage, in order to build the architecture landscape and apply enterprise architecture management practices. Existing enterprise architecture frameworks, languages, and methodologies are discussed. Proposed approach is based on mapping between business process and enterprise architecture elements in order to present all business architecture artifacts in a single coarse-grained model. The software implementation allows generating business architecture landscapes that could be used for architecture evolution purposes, such as transformation planning or maintenance efforts evaluation.
Towards the Generalized Criterion for Evaluation of Business Process Model Quality
Business process management has become the most widely-used and reliable approach to organizational management over the last decades. It is also considered as a part of quality management system in an organization. Business process modeling is the core of business process management, which is used for visualization, analysis, and improvement of organizational activities. Moreover, business process modeling plays an important role in the context of business process management maturity of an overall enterprise. Therefore, this paper is focused on the problem of business process model quality evaluation. Existing approaches based on the process modeling guidelines, measures and corresponding thresholds are reviewed, as well as the refined process modeling rules, corresponding quality criteria, the generalized quality criterion, and thresholds for its translation into linguistic values are proposed. The data model and software prototype are developed and the validation results are outlined.
An Approach to Development of Interactive Adaptive Software Tool to Support Data Analysis Activity
In the recent decades, databases have been used in any field of human activity to keep valuable data about ongoing processes. Large amounts of data stored in enterprise databases are useless without having a specialized software tool for data discovery or querying. Most business users that make data-driven decisions usually do not have special training and experience in database querying using special formal languages. Existing solutions are based on “query wizards” and database query forms that require knowledge of a database schema and inconvenient for users without special training. Proposed approach is based on the content-based filtering of already executed queries by usage frequency and similarity criteria in order to suggest relevant queries that may be re-used. It is a baseline of the interactive adaptive system for data analysis, which design and development is outlined in this study. Software prototype was demonstrated and its usage was discussed. Conclusions were made and future research was formulated.
An Approach and Software Prototype for Translation of Natural Language Business Rules into Database Structure
In the recent decades data has indeed become one of the most valuable assets for government institutions, private businesses, and individual persons. Nowadays almost any software, from social networks and dating mobile applications to large information systems and analytical services for enterprise management, accumulates, stores, and processes data to solve certain problems in their subject areas. Extremely large data volumes are organized in databases that are used as the baseline for almost all of modern software applications. As the most important components of software systems, databases should be carefully designed, since drawbacks at the stage of requirements elicitation may result in exponential growth of defects fixing costs at testing and maintenance phases. Therefore, this study proposes an approach and software tool to database schema generation from textual requirements also known in database design domain as business rules. This may help database designers to rapidly obtain usable database schemas in order to detect and fix defects as early as possible. Moreover, proposed solution may simplify the database design process, since database creation scripts are generated from business rules directly. Thus, instead of coding all the required statements, engineers are only need to check obtained schema and make certain adjustments to data types, unique attributes, or used naming style. This research considers relational model and relational databases, since they are most widely used nowadays. State-of-the-art analysis is made, proposed approach is described in details, software tool with its brief usage examples is described, conclusions are made, and further research directions are formulated.
Towards the Tokenization of Business Process Models using the Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts
Business process modeling helps organizations to capture their workflows visually as diagrams that could be then used to share best practices, identify inefficiencies in ongoing activities, instruct employees, use them as reference solutions, etc. Design and analysis of business process models are essential technologies of the Business Process Management approach, which is successfully adopted and practiced nowadays by many large and medium enterprises. Therefore, business process models should be considered as organizational assets that depict usable and competitive business solutions, which value could be proven by benchmarking. Single reference business process models or even collections of business process models are already accessible on Internet, sometimes for free or, usually, for purchasing because of the value of transferred knowledge. However, peer-to-peer exchange of business process models on a commercial basis is still far from a unification. At the same time, the tremendous growth of the cryptocurrency market and the adoption of Bitcoin by governments (first by El Salvador in June 2021) makes crypto-economics, also referred to as “tokenomics”, usable for organizational knowledge sharing and exchanging without third party authorities, such as banks, or payment systems. Moreover, collaborating parties could reach a consensus when exchanging business process models using smart contracts and crypto-tokens to access shared knowledge artifacts. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach to business process model tokenization using blockchain technology and smart contracts. There was proposed as an Ethereum smart contract that combines features of the business process model collection and the non-fungible token. A prototype of a decentralized application was developed and its usage was demonstrated.
An Approach and a Software Tool for Automatic Source Code Generation driven by Business Rules
This paper proposes an approach to automatic source code generation driven by business rules. This approach is inspired by low-code and automatic programming to improve the software development process and accelerate product delivery through the source code generation from natural language statements. The proposed approach considers business rules as input, uses the triplestore model for knowledge representation based on business rules, utilizes association rules to suggest attribute data types, and produces an abstract data model. This abstract data model is a framework for software components generation of various purposes and syntax, such as SQL scripts for database tables creation and Java Beans for server-side implementation. A software solution based on the proposed approach translates the data model into the source code of software components: MySQL database and Java classes. But it can be extended to generate various software components based on different syntax rules. Performed experiments demonstrate that generated software components are verified and valid since they were checked using static code analysis and dynamic testing. Conclusion formulates research outcomes, obtained results, and limitations. Future work outlines the next research steps in this field.
Towards Understandability Evaluation of Business Process Models using Activity Textual Analysis
There are two purposes of business process modeling. Business process models are created by business analysts for understanding, analysis, and improvement of process scenarios, search, and elimination of weak spots and bottlenecks in organizational activities. Another purpose of business process models is the requirements engineering in software development projects. In both cases, the quality of created business process models is the core issue. Poor models are similar to text documents written with mistakes – they are not understandable, which may negatively impact the real processes they represent and the software workflows they describe. However, existing studies in the field of business process model quality mostly focus on the structural analysis of models using size, complexity, and other metrics with thresholds, while the textual analysis of activity labels is omitted. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an approach to the analysis of business process model understandability taking into account best practices of activity labeling. The proposed approach includes the use of natural language processing techniques, so the respective software tool was developed to perform experiments with a set of business process models. According to obtained results, we suggest considering both textual and structural qualities to achieve the understandability of business process models due to the bad correlation between these metrics (0.0171) – well-structured models can have unclear activity labels and vice versa.
Towards the Enterprise Architecture Web Mining Approach and Software Tool
This paper considers the enterprise architecture model extraction from organizational websites in an automatic way to simplify the blueprinting of enterprise architecture landscapes at the conceptual level. Thus, such a technique is proposed to be called “enterprise architecture web mining”. Nowadays almost all organizations offer their products and services through their websites, therefore, representing their value-creating business processes on the Internet. Thus, enterprise homepages can be considered as sources of business information sufficient to understand the company’s business processes landscape and make further decisions depending on the party that uses such information. The proposed approach includes two major stages of business activity detection using hyperlinks of the company’s webpage that could represent triggers of certain e-commerce business processes, and enterprise architecture model creation based on the obtained data. The software implementation of the proposed approach uses natural language processing to detect business activities on the corporate web pages and produces human-readable enterprise architecture models that describe business processes offered by examined organizations and supportive application and technology environment. Obtained models represent knowledge about primary business activities conducted by organizations and could be used for decision-making. As the result, the enterprise architecture landscapes were built for several organizations using only their publicly available websites. The limitations are discussed, the conclusion is made, and future work in this field is formulated.
