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The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify differences in the utilisation of an electronic medical record test–result management system between two acute care departments. Field observations (130 min) and semi-structured interviews (n = 24) were conducted in the Intensive Care Unit and Emergency Department of an Australian hospital. Work processes identified from audio transcripts were modelled using business process modelling. Comparison of the Emergency Department and Intensive Care Unit identified the following: (1) test ordering variations according to clinical roles, (2) differences in the use of electronic medical record functionality according to specific demands of the clinical environment and (3) the non-linear components of the test–result management process. Variations were identified in the number of process decisions, external collaborations and temporal process workflows. Modelling the business processes, collaboration and communication needs of individual clinical environments can aid in enhancing the quality and appositeness of health information technology interventions and thus contribute to improving patient safety. Future health information technology interventions/evaluations aimed at improving the safety of test–result management processes need to address both the nuances of the clinical environment and accommodate the individual work practices of clinicians within that environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-commerce business process nets (EBPNs) are a novel formal model for describing and validating e-commerce systems including interactive parties such as shopper, merchant, and third-party payment platform. Data errors and nondeterminacy of the data states during the trading process can be depicted with the help of EBPNs. However, the problem about how to analyze EBPNs remains largely open. To analyze their data-liveness, data-boundedness, and reachability, this paper presents two analysis methods. For EBPNs, reachability analysis is proposed based on a 3-D incidence matrix method. Additionally, reduction methods are proposed for a special EBPN. Finally, the validity and reliability of the proposed methods are illustrated via the examples of e-commerce systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective of the study was to investigate what managers think about the impact of Web 2.0 technologies on business operations. The empirical research was conducted among top and middle managers in companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina during May and June 2015. The results show that, although all respondents do not use these technologies, they have a relatively positive opinion on the application of Web 2.0 technologies in business. According to their opinion, Web 2.0 technologies make the most important contribution to data and information sharing in company and have a significant impact on the quality of communication, both internal and external.These results encourage further research on the application of Web 2.0 technologies in business and the use of all the advantages and benefits they can provide to someone actively using them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A time- and resource-sensitive simple business process (TR-SBP) consists of a finite set of finite series of activities that have timing and resource constraints. A TR-SBP seems simple, but its analysis needs to consider what are not explicitly mentioned as activities and may introduce a non-negligible number of intermediate states. In this sense, the analysis has similarities with security protocol analysis that needs to consider intruders. We formalize TR-SBPs as a round-based model called Formal TR-SBPs in this paper. We describe how to specify Formal TR-SBPs in Maude, a specification language based on rewriting logic and Alloy, a specification language based on first-order relational logic, and how to analyze Formal TR-SBPs based on those specifications with Maude and Alloy. A nursing problem is used as an example of TR-SBPs in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a social coordination approach that addresses the issue of conflicts over resources during business process execution. A business process consists of tasks that persons and/or machines execute. The resources, that business processes require at run-time, are sometimes limited and/or not-renewable. The approach uses a set of social relations that connect tasks/persons/machines together. These relations are the basis of developing specialized networks that capture the interactions during business process execution and are used to recommend corrective actions when conflicts over resources occur. These actions are dependent on the properties of tasks, persons and machines properties which referred to as transactional, activity, and operational, respectively. A system that demonstrates the approach is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, online shopping integrating third-party payment platforms (TPPs) introduces new security challenges due to complex interactions between Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of Merchants and TPPs. Malicious clients may exploit security vulnerabilities by calling APIs in an arbitrary order or playing various roles. To deal with the security issue in the early stages of system development, this paper presents a formal method for modeling and verification of online shopping business processes with malicious behavior patterns considered based on Petri nets. We propose a formal model called E-commerce Business Process Net to model a normal online shopping business process that represent intended functions, and malicious behavior patterns representing a potential attack that violates the security goals at the requirement analysis phase. Then, we synthesize the normal business process and malicious behavior patterns by an incremental modeling method. According to the synthetic model, we analyze whether an online shopping business process is resistant to the known malicious behavior patterns. As a result, our approach can make the software design provably secured from the malicious attacks at process design time and, thus, reduces the difficulty and cost of modification for imperfect systems at the release phase. We demonstrate our approach through a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Problem Frames have become a useful approach for requirements analysis, little research has been made to explore how to derive them from a complex problem context. The purpose of this paper is to propose such an approach. The proposed approach consists of three steps to drive the development of Problem Frames. In the first step, business process models are developed to capture the behavioural view of the problem context. In the second step, object analysis models are used to capture the structural view of the problem context. Together, these two views collectively and adequately capture the early context knowledge. These two types of model will then be used in the third step to construct context diagrams and derive Problem Frames. A complex real-world problem - equity trading problem - is used to illustrate this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the need for evaluation techniques for complex business processes, also known as workflows, this paper proposes an approach based on generalized stochastic Petri nets (GSPNs). We review ten related approaches published in the last fifteen years and compare them to our approach using a wide range of criteria. On the basis of this evaluation, we observe that the newly proposed approach provides results that are at least as good as those from the most accepted alternatives and holds a number of additional advantages, such as modeling simplicity, improved precision, and model reuse for qualitative analyses. The overall approach is formally defined in this paper, along with the definition of several performance metrics. Part of these metrics can be computed analytically, while the remainder can be obtained by simulating the GSPN. Furthermore, a tool has been developed to translate automatically business process execution language processes into GSPNs. Finally, we present a case study in which we applied the proposed approach, colored Petri net tools, and an industrial tool to obtain performance insights into a realistic workflow. The results were highly similar, demonstrating the feasibility and the accuracy of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the factors influencing the optimal partition of a business process into subtasks to minimize the process cycle time. The paper develops a single-class open, queueing network model that incorporates the productivity gains due to the division of labor and the server time lost to coordination. An optimization model to minimize the cycle time subject to a maximum number of servers is presented. We derive an upper bound on the number of subtasks and present an algorithm to optimally solve the problem. We conduct an experimental analysis using the model to understand how the coordination time, process technology, and utilization affect the optimal division of labor. The model confirms that as the coordination time increases, the optimal number of subtasks decreases. Moreover, the results show the technology parameter has little effect when coordination is high, and if the utilization increases, then the optimal number of subtasks increases. The model and results provide a means to determine the optimal number of subtasks for a process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: A major objective in business interactions consists in enhancing the business perspective over service provision by developing strategies and tools to provide support in the selection of services according to the value they have for businesses. This means providing a way to determine the value of services according to specific business criteria, and conceive technologies that support the sharing of knowledge involved in service provision. In this paper we present an approach based on semantic repositories. The repository enables a business perspective over service provision, based on the association between services and business processes, and is related to the problem of supporting businesses in the value-driven service selection. This perspective is addressed in the paper by exploiting expressive semantic representations and reasoning. An ontology for representing relevant semantic properties of services and processes is provided, and an algorithm for value-based service selection is presented. Two real life case studies show the effectiveness of the approach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The increasing demands concerning the modifiability and connectivity of business processes cannot be met adequately anymore by relying on best practices only. There is an urgent need for a reference conceptual framework for studying, modeling, analyzing and designing business processes. The Language–Action Perspective (LAP), in particular Habermas’ theory of Communicative Action offers a sound and rigid foundation for such a framework. In this paper, the DEMO (Demo Engineering Methodology for Organizations)-framework is presented. It builds on the LAP-based theoretical foundation of the DEMO methodology. Several other LAP-based frameworks have been proposed in the past years. They are evaluated in a comparative review with the DEMO-framework. Several shortcomings of these frameworks are revealed and discussed. The practical applicability of the DEMO-framework is demonstrated using a small example. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In order to perform business modelling as apart of information systems development, there is a need for frameworks and methods. The paper proposes a framework for business interaction based on a language/action perspective. The framework is an architecture of five generic layers. The first layer concept is ‘business act’, which functions as the basic unit of analysis. The following four layer concepts are ‘action pair’, ‘exchange’, ‘business transaction’, and ‘transaction group’. The framework is inspired by a similar framework constructed by Weigand et al. The paper makes a critical examination of this framework as a basis for the proposed framework. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A framework for the design and enactment of flexible and adaptive business processes combines design-time and runtime mechanisms to offer a single integrated solution. The design-time environment supports the specification of process-driven Web applications with quality-of-service (QoS) constraints and monitoring annotations. The runtime identifies the actual services, from the QoS perspective, oversees the execution through monitoring, and reacts to failures and infringement of QoS constraints. This article discusses these issues on a proof-of-concept application developed for an industrial supply-chain scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]