Research On The Methodology Of Context-aware Business Process Modelling Integrating Decision Models

Due to the economic and technological progress,business processes embed in morecomplicated and easily-accessible environments.A conventional process model may need multiple variants to fit different situations.A challenge has posed to both industry and academia consists of identifying relevant contextualization from explosive Big Data and modelling business processes accommodated to the dynamism.Thus recent studies have explored context-awareness as a new paradigm and principle in designing processes.Lately,BPM is moving towards the separation of concerns paradigm by externalizing decisions from the process flow.Most notably,the introduction of DMN(Decision Model and Notation)standard provides a solution and technique to model decisions and the process separately but consistently integrated.Moving towards the context-aware BPM(Business Process Management),even decisions and rules have been used as a hidden workaround to practically solve issues,decisions have been still considered within processes modelling,which impairs the flexibility and analytics capability of both processes and decisions,as well as overlooks the key role that decisions play therein.The literature indicates context as a source of information that should be considered in the business process modelling.Therefore,relevant contextual data needs to be integrated as a key component of processes' data flow and adapt processes accordingly as their consequent variants.Then the research question can be presented as “What data constitutes the context of a business process and how does the context lead to business process variability?”.Some researchers have attempted to answer this research question by proposing methods to organize different forms of adaptation variants in a business process model,such as process invariants and variants.Meanwhile,some taxonomic methods or analysis frameworks have been given for process contextualization,but it is still vague for practically identifying relevant contextual data for a specific business process.Contextualization and its connection with resulting process variants have been excessively relied on professionals,which is no longer practical since people cannot perceive the enormous amount of data in business environments.Hence,it is vital to propose a methodological method for determining relevant data that constitute the context of a process and bridging the gap between the context and consequent process variants.Recent studies also indicate BPM can benefit from Io T(Internet of Things)and Io T commonly used to automate and improve the operational efficiency in BPM,especially for process reengineering.Io T coupled to intelligent data analytics is the preeminent cornerstone technology for companies towards digital transformation.Since Io T has the capability of capturing dynamic context from the physical world into the digital world,contextual information that is invisibly embedded in the diverse environment and system behavior can be continuously and automatically collected by the Io T infrastructure.Io T concepts or devices are integrated in business processes as a resource in some studies.However,Io T integration in the context management of a business process is still limited since there is a lack of a methodological framework to connect Io T infrustructure to BPM.More specifically,the context of a business process needs Io T data as a dynamic perspective,and decisions of a business process need Io T data to be agile.Then the research question can be presented as “How to bridge the Io T infrustructure to business processses for obtaining context-awareness?”.The main research contents and contributions are as follows:(1)Providing standard definitions for the concepts of the context of a business process and the context-aware business process,as well as a formal presentation of the contextaware business process construct as the theoretical foundation for this research.(2)Analyzing the role that decisions play in the system of context-aware BPM by investigating how different types of context-dependent decisions could trigger a process changes from different perspectives,as well as providing the theretical connection of process,context and decision constructs.(3)Adapting the separate concern of decisions into the context-aware BPM world and proposing a Deci-CaBPM(Decision-based Context-aware Business Process Modelling)framework for systematically modelling a context-aware business process.(4)Proposing a framework for connecting the Io T infrastructure to the context-aware BPM ecosystem using Io T-integrated ontologies,dynamic analytic models and Io Tenhanced decision models.(5)Implementing a real-world case study in a representative bulk port with the application of Deci-CaBPM framework under the Io T environment for evaluating the methodology effectiveness.Figure 51,Table 14,References 183.