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Towards a method for business process and informal business rules compliance
Author(s) -
De Nicola Antonio,
Missikoff Michele,
Smith Fabrizio
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
journal of software: evolution and process
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.371
H-Index - 29
eISSN - 2047-7481
pISSN - 2047-7473
DOI - 10.1002/smr.553
Subject(s) - business process reengineering , computer science , business rule , business process , business process management , ambiguity , business process modeling , business process model and notation , artifact centric business process model , process management , process modeling , semantics of business vocabulary and business rules , process (computing) , table (database) , knowledge management , software engineering , data mining , work in process , programming language , engineering , operations management , lean manufacturing
SUMMARY Business process reengineering (BPR) is a common practice for a continuous improvement of the organization and the operations of an enterprise. An important technique of BPR is based on business rules (BRs). The latter are, in general, represented using natural language and, therefore, carry a certain degree of imprecision and ambiguity; therefore, our first objective is to start from informal BR and disambiguate them by using a question answering method based on a decision table. The introduction of BRs impacts on existing business processes (BPs), requiring often a reengineering intervention. In this paper, we present an approach to BPR based on the systematic use of ontologies and semantic annotations and focused on dependency constraints, a particular kind of BRs. To this end, we propose the synergic use of Business Process Abstract Language, a BP modeling framework to represent BP schemas, and Object Process Actor modeling Language, an ontological framework to capture the semantics of a business scenario. Both the frameworks are grounded in logic, and therefore, it is possible to apply effective reasoning methods to make inferences over a Business Process Knowledge Base stemming from the union of the two above components. Then we propose a query engine allowing for the detection of BPs that are not compliant with the BRs and, more precisely, the specific BP segment where to intervene. The proposed platform has been conceived not to substitute existing BPM tools but to integrate them providing advanced services to support rule‐based BPR activities. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.