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This article proposes a flexible way in business process modeling and managing. Today, business process needs to be more flexible and adaptable. The regulations and policies in organizations, as origins of change, are often expressed in terms of business rules. The ECA (Event-condition-action) rule is a popular way to incorporate flexibility into a process design. To raise the flexibility in the business processes, the authors consider governing any business activity through ECA rules based on business rules. For adaptability, the separation of concerns supports adaptation in several ways. To cope with flexibility and adaptability, the authors propose a new multi concern rule based model. For each concern, each business rule is formalized using their CECAPENETE formalism (Concern -Event-Condition-Action-Post condition- check Execution- Number of check -Else-Trigger-else Event). Then, the rules based process is translated into a graph of rules that is analyzed in terms of relations between concerns, reliably and flexibility.

Mining association rules is a well known framework for extracting useful knowledge from databases. Despite their proven applicability there exist other approaches that also search for novel and useful information such us peculiarities, infrequent rules, exceptions or anomalous rules. The common feature of these proposals is the low support of such type of rules. So there is a necessity of finding efficient algorithms for extracting them. The principal objective of this paper is providing a unified framework for dealing with such kind of rules. In our case, we take advantage of an existing logic approach called GUHA. This model was first presented in the middle sixties by Hájek et al. and then has been developed by Rauch and others in the last decade. Following this line, this paper also offers some interesting issues. First, it provides a deep analysis of semantics and formulation of exception and anomalous rules. Second, we define the so called double rules as a new type of rules which in conjunction with exceptions and anomalies will describe in more detail the relationship between two sets of items. Third, we give new approaches for mining them and we propose an algorithm with reasonably good performance.

As business policies and environments change constantly, there is a need for service-oriented systems to be compliant, yet adaptive. The solution proposed in this paper is based on a clear architectural separation of policy specification, enforcement strategy and realization. Policy compliance is worked out as a rule transformation process mediating between the business policy language SBVR and Condition-Action (CA) rules. The solution supports adaptation caused by business policy evolution as well as adaptation caused by service evolution. In addition, the paper describes a novel truly service-oriented way of implementing compliance management and enforcement of business policies drawing on Adaptive Service Oriented Architecture (ASOA).

As it is common to imbed business objects/rules within the code of traditional ERP systems, the flexibility, scalability of these systems has been greatly restricted. This paper proposes extensible business objects framework, by which service-oriented componentization of business objects are modeling and a homogeneous component enterprise business system is constructed. The framework described in this paper enables enterprises to develop enterprise resource planning systems that systematically map their business logic to externally applied entities called business objects. Practice shows, when using the toolkits supplied by this framework, the ERP systems will be flexible, extensible and easy-to-develop.

The behavior of commercial systems is described with business process models. There are different notations and formalism to express business processes. Many of these notations such as BPMN or ARIS EPC models are widely used in commercial projects. In the paper we focus on formalisms to express rules and specifications for the business processes. Temporal logic in general is a suitable formalism to express rules for dynamic processes. CTL is one kind of temporal logic focusing on branches and paths in particular. With CTL it is possible to formulate rules about different paths in business processes. Since the textual formulae of CTL are not very suitable in the development of commercial systems we introduce a graphical notation (G-CTL) based on the business process notation ARIS EPC. Moreover, we add to the CTL semantics specializes to differentiate between the element types in business process models and provide wildcards which allow the user to check for unknown elements or elements with only partially known properties.

UML is used as a language for object-oriented software design, and as a language for conceptual modeling of applications domains. Given the differences between these purposes, UML’s origins in software engineering might limit its appropriateness for conceptual modeling. In this context, Evermann and Wand have proposed a set of well-defined ontological rules to constrain the construction of UML diagrams to reflect underlying ontological assumptions about the real world. The authors extend their work using a design research approach that examines these rules by studying the consequences of integrating them into a UML CASE tool. The paper demonstrates how design insights from incorporating theory-based modeling rules in a software artifact can be used to shed light on the rules themselves. In particular, the authors distinguish four categories of rules for implementation purposes, reflecting the relative importance of different rules and the degree of flexibility available in enforcing them. They propose distinct implementation strategies that correspond to these four rule categories and identify some redundant rules as well as some rules that cannot be implemented without changing the UML specification. The rules are implemented in an open-source UML CASE tool.

This article has been retracted due to partial plagiarism and the author Murali Mohanan takes full responsibility for the partial plagiarism detected. A notice of retraction is published in Vol. 27...

Effective and efficient strategic decision making is the backbone for the success of a business organization. These decision making processes, used among its competitors in a particular industry, determine whether the business will continue to survive or not. In this research, fuzzy logic (FL) concept and game theory are being used to model strategic decision making processes by business organizations. Competition between business organizations is viewed as a game with each business organization as a player. A player formulates his own decisions by making his strategic moves based on uncertain information. This is the information he has about the opponents with respect to prevailing or anticipated market demand, cost of production, marketing, consolidation efforts and some other business variables. This uncertain information is being modelled using the concept of fuzzy logic. The game is played between a fuzzy agent and human agents in a resource allocation game between two players with uncertain information. Moreover, fuzzy rules are constructed that symbolize various rules and strategic variables that a firm takes into consideration before taking a decision. Our model also includes a learning procedure that enables the agent to optimize the fuzzy rules and his decision processes. Matlab software was used for the design and implementation of the fuzzy decision making system and this procedure and methodology can be easily implemented by business managers and can assist them in their strategic policy formulation.

In enterprise firms, enormous amounts of electronic documents are generated by business analysts and other business domain application users. Applications that use these documents are often driven by business logic that is hard-coded together with application logic. One approach to the separation of business logic from applications is to create and maintain business and information extraction rules in an external, user-friendly format. The drawback of such an externalization is that the business rules, usually, do not have machine interpretable semantics. This situation often leads to misinterpretation of domain analysis documents, which can inhibit the productivity of computer-assisted analytical work and the effectiveness of business solutions. This paper proposes an ontology and rule-based framework for the development of business domain applications, which includes semantic processing of externalized business rules and to some extent externalization of application logic. The creation of external information extraction rules by the business analyst is a cumbersome and time consuming task. In order to overcome this problem, the framework also includes a rule learning system to semi-automate the generation of information extraction rules from source documents with the help of manual annotations. The main idea behind the work presented in this paper is to re-engineer very large enterprise information systems to adapt to Semantic Web computing techniques. The work presented in this paper is inspired by an industrial project.

This article has been retracted due to partial plagiarism and the author Murali Mohanan takes full responsibility for the partial plagiarism detected. A notice of retraction is published in Vol. 27 No. 8

A common way to represent organizational domains is the use of business process models. A Workflow-net (WF-net) is an application of Petri Nets (with additional rules) that model business process behavior. However, the use of WF-nets to model business processes has some shortcomings. In particular, no rules exist beyond the general constraints of WF-nets to guide the mapping of an actual process into a net. Syntactically correct WF-nets may provide meaningful models of how organizations conduct their business processes. Moreover, the processes represented by these nets may not be feasible to execute or reach their business goals when executed. In this paper, the authors propose a set of rules for mapping the domain in which a process operates into a WF-net, which they derived by attaching ontological semantics to WF-nets. The rules guide the construction of WF-nets, which are meaningful in that their nodes and transitions are directly related to the modeled (business) domains. Furthermore, the proposed semantics imposes on the process models constraints that guide the development of valid process models, namely, models that assure that the process can accomplish its goal when executed.

As most of the processes for collaborative business are dynamic business processes that frequently change in accordance with business collaboration situations, current major business process modeling technologies, which are designed for modeling prescriptive business scenarios, are not appropriate for describing collaborative business requiring dynamic change. As an alternative for this limitation, Human Interaction Management (HIM) suggests a dynamic process modeling method based on Role Activity Diagram (RAD). However, the current process modeling method of HIM has two problems: lack of machine-processability and inexistence of platform-independently exchangeable form. To address these problems, this research proposes an OWL-based process modeling method based on RAD modeling of HIM. As the proposed modeling method provides machine-processability, platform-independence, and semantic interoperability to business process models, collaborative business can be performed more efficiently.

Process modeling and rule modeling languages are both used to document organizational policies and procedures. To date, their synergies and overlap are under-researched. Understanding the relationship between the two modeling types would allow organizations to maximize synergies, avoid content duplication, and thus reduce their overall modeling effort. In this paper, we use the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) representation theory to compare the representation capabilities of process and rule modeling languages. We perform a representational analysis of four rule modeling specifications: The Simple Rule Markup Language (SRML), the Semantic Web Rules Language (SWRL), the Production Rule Representation (PRR), and the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) specification. We compare their BWW representation capabilities with those of four popular conceptual process modeling languages. In our analysis, we focus on the aspects of maximum ontological completeness and minimum ontological overlap. The outcome of this study shows that no single language is internally complete with respect to the BWW representation model. We also show that a combination of two languages, in particular SRML and BPMN, appears to be better suited for combined process and rule modeling than any of these modeling languages used independently.

UML is currently the most widely used modeling language for the specification of the conceptual schema (CS) of an information system (IS). However, UML falls short when it comes to allow business people to define in their own language (e.g. using their own terms in natural language) the policies and rules by which they run their business. To this purpose, the semantics of business vocabulary and business rules (SBVR) metamodel specification was proposed. SBVR is conceptualized optimally for business people and it is designed to be used for business purposes, independently of information systems designs. Clearly, SBVR and unified modeling language (UML) cannot be considered as isolated languages. Many of the business rules specified by business people must be automatically executed by the underlying information system, and thus, they must also appear in its UML CS. In this sense, the main goal of this paper is to bridge the gap between UML and SBVR by providing an automatic transformation from UML to SBVR specifications. Thanks to our transformation, designers will be able to interact with the business people (in their own language) to refine and validate the information modeled in the CS before the generation of the final IS implementation. Our transformation also takes into account all possible textual object constraint language (OCL) expressions that complement the UML graphical elements.

The authors use a simulation approach to determine effective management of resource allocation and task prioritization decisions for the development of open source enterprise solutions software in the context of a large scale collaborative development project (CDP). Unlike traditional software systems where users have limited access to the development team, in open source environments, the resolution of issues is a collaborative effort among users and the team. However, as the project grows in size, complexity, and usage, effective allocation of resources and prioritization of tasks become a necessity to improve the operational performance of the software system. In this paper, by mining an open source software repository, the authors analyze the effects of collaborative issue resolution in a CDP and its effects on resource allocation of the team developers. This article examines several scenarios to evaluate the effects of forum discussions, resource allocation, and task prioritization on operational performance of the software system.

Business performance measurements, decision support systems (DSS) and online analytical processing (OLAP) have a common goal i.e., to assist decision-makers during the decision-making process. Integrating DSS and OLAP into existing business performance measurements hopes to improve the accuracy of analysis and provide in-depth, multi-angle view of data. This paper describes a decision support system containing our methodology, Weighted and Layered workflow evaluation (WaLwFA), extended to incorporate business intelligence using C4.5 and association rule algorithms. C4.5 produces more comprehensible decision trees by showing only important attributes. Furthermore, C4.5 can be transformed into IF-THEN rules. However, association rules are preferred as data can be described in rules of multiple granularities. Sorting rules based on rules' complexities permits OLAP to navigate through layers of complexities to extract rules of relevant sizes and to view data from multidimensional perspectives in each layer. Experimental results on an airline domain are presented.

The UMLtoSBVR tool facilitates the interaction between designers and business people in order to refine and validate the information modeled in a UML conceptual schema (CS) to make sure that the CS is correct before starting the implementation phase. To this end, the tool is able to paraphrase the CS, i.e. to describe the CS elements using natural language expressions that can be understood by the business people lacking of the technical background to directly understand the UML notation. As an intermediate step, the tool transforms the UML CS into a SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules) specification. The SBVR standard facilitates the expression of the CS in different natural language styles (as Structured English or Rule Speak).

The Enterprise Architecture refers to a comprehensive description of all of the key elements and relationships that make up an organization [Harmon, P. (2003). Developing an Enterprise Architecture, Business process trends: Whitepaper]. Through the Enterprise Architecture, enterprises can implement enterprise integration to cope with dynamically changing business environment. Existing Enterprise Architectures, however, lack of semantics for humans and systems to understand them exactly and commonly, which causes communication problems between humans or between systems or between human and system. These communication problems keep enterprises from implementing integration and collaborating with other enterprises. In order to solve this problem, the ontology-based Enterprise Architecture is suggested in this paper. The Enterprise Architecture ontology is composed of ontologies in three levels. Ontologies of business terms are in the first level, ontologies of Enterprise Architecture components are in the second level, and ontologies of relationships among Enterprise Architecture components are in the top level. The ontologies of business terms are defined in the approach of the WordNet, and the ontologies of Enterprise Architecture components and relationships of them are defined in the approach of the SBVR. Through these ontologies, it is expected that humans and systems can understand Enterprise Architectures exactly and commonly, which supports integrations in enterprises and collaborations between enterprises.

It is a commonplace within philosophy that the ontology of institutions can be captured in terms of constitutive rules. What exactly such rules are, however, is not well understood. They are usually contrasted to regulative rules: constitutive rules (such as the rules of chess) make institutional actions possible, whereas regulative rules (such as the rules of etiquette) pertain to actions that can be performed independently of such rules. Some, however, maintain that the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules is merely a linguistic one. In this paper I present the status account of constitutive rules in order to address this criticism. According to the status account constitutive rules pertain to institutional statuses and statuses are to be understood in terms of status rules. Status rules concern the enabling and constraining roles of institutions, and constitutive rules specify the preconditions that have to be met in order for them to play these roles. Even though I end up endorsing the claim that the distinction mentioned is a linguistic one, I go on to argue that there is an underlying reality that constitutive rules serve to make apparent.

The approach to business rules introduces a new layer of business rules to the Information System design and architecture. As the rules are separated from the data and presentation aspects of the system, numerous changes have to be applied to the traditional process of information system development. Proper structuring of business rules becomes crucial. .

Use of Business Models within Model Driven Architecture Model Driven Architecture is a framework dedicated for development of large and complex computer systems. It states and implements the principle of architectural separation of concerns. This means that a system can be modeled from three different but related to each other viewpoints. The viewpoint discussed in this paper is a Computation Independent one. MDA specification states that a model that shows a system from this viewpoint is a business model. Taking into account transformations foreseen by MDA, it should be useful for automation of software development processes. This paper discusses an essence of the Computation Independent Model (CIM) and the place of business models in the computation independent modeling. This paper considers four types of business models, namely, SBVR, BPMN, use cases and Topological Functioning Model (TFM). Business persons use SBVR to define business vocabularies and business rules of the existing and planned domains, BPMN to define business processes of both existing and planned domains, and use cases to define business requirements to the planned domain. The TFM is used to define functionality of both existing and planned domains. This paper discusses their capabilities to be used as complete CIMs with formally defined conformity between planned and existing domains.

In Process-Aware Information Systems, business processes are often modeled in an explicit way. Roughly speaking, the available business process modeling languages can be divided into two groups.Languages from the first group are preferred by academic people but shunned by business people, and include Petri nets and process algebras. These academic languages have a proper formal semantics, which allows the corresponding academic models to be verified in a formal way. Languages from the second group are preferred by business people but disliked by academic people, and include BPEL, BPMN, and EPCs. These business languages often lack any proper semantics, which often leads to debates on how to interpret certain business models. Nevertheless, business models are used in practice, whereas academic models are hardly used. To be able to use, for example, the abundance of Petri net verification techniques on business models, we need to be able to transform these models to Petri nets. In this paper, we investigate a number of Petri net transformations that already exist.For every transformation, we investigate the transformation itself, the constructs in the business models that are problematic for the transformation and the main applications for the transformation.

This paper investigates the operational semantics of temporal logic programs. To this end, a temporal logic programming language called Framed Tempura is employed. The evaluation rules for both the arithmetic and boolean expressions are defined. The semantic equivalence rules for the reduction of a program within a state is formalized. Furthermore, the transition rules within a state and transition rules over an interval between configurations are also specified. Moreover, some examples are given to illustrate how these rules work. Thus, the executable behavior of framed programs can be captured in an operational way. In addition, the consistency between the operational semantics and the minimal model semantics based on model theory is proved in detail.

We present in this paper BP-QL, a novel query language for querying business processes. The BP-QL language is based on an intuitive model of business processes, an abstraction of the emerging BPEL (business process execution language) standard. It allows users to query business processes visually, in a manner very analogous to how such processes are typically specified, and can be employed in a distributed setting, where process components may be provided by distinct providers. We describe here the query language as well as its underlying formal model. We consider the properties of the various language components and explain how they influenced the language design. In particular we distinguish features that can be efficiently supported, and those that incur a prohibitively high cost, or cannot be computed at all. We also present our implementation which complies with real life standards for business process specifications, XML, and Web services, and is used in the BP-QL system.

A critical success factor for information systems is their ability to evolve as their environment changes. There is compelling evidence that the management of change in business policy can have a profound effect on an information system’s ability to evolve effectively and efficiently. For this to be successful, there is a need to represent business rules from the early requirements stage, expressed in user-understandable terms, to downstream system design components and maintain these throughout the lifecycle of the system. Any user-oriented changes could then be traced and if necessary propagated from requirements to design specifications and evaluated by both end-users and developers about their impact on the system. The BROOD approach, discussed in this article, aims to provide seamless traceability between requirements and system designs through the modelling of business rules and the successive transformations, using UML as the modelling framework.

International audience; The early detection of flaws and errors has become a significant feature of a business process modeling tool. This paper proposes an ontology-based approach for business process compliance checking. The business processes and the business rules are represented in a machine understandable form, a reasoner is used to reason on this knowledge base for detecting the potential semantic error by using a set of predefined rules.

While formal verification of business process models (BPMs) can be done through model checking (also known as property checking), formalizing corresponding properties having the process model available may negatively influence the formulation of properties to be checked. In addition, properties should be checkable for several processes. So, we address the problem of formalizing properties without knowing the process model. The solution proposed in this paper employs additional models of object life cycles. The new key idea is to formulate properties referring to these additional models, which together can represent certain business rules. These models have to be connected with the BPM to be checked in the formalism used for model checking. This combination facilitates more rigorous model checking with a better decoupling of the specification of the original BPM from the properties to be checked. In summary, this paper presents how a combination of conventional business process models (given, e.g., in BPMN), models of business object life cycles, and formalized business rules can be used for verification through model checking.

The same business concepts can be expressed in various knowledge representations like processes or rules. This paper presents an interoperability solution for transforming a subset of the SBVR rules into the BPMN and DMN models. The translation algorithm describes how to translate the SBVR vocabulary, structural and operational rules into particular BPMN and DMN elements. The result is a combined process and decision model, which can be used for validating SBVR rules by people aware of BPMN and DMN notations.

BPMN is an adopted standard used in industry for modeling business processes. However it is not provided with a formal semantics, limiting the possibility of analysis to informal approaches such as observation. In this paper, we present a formal approach that detects business rules violations using the Business Rule Language (BRL) which helps us express many common types of business rules that could be verified by a Depth-First Search algorithm adapted for the BPMN standard.

The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is a specification created by the Object Management Group (OMG) to provide a way to semantically describe business concepts and specify business rules. However, reasoning with SBVR is still an open subject, and current efforts to provide reasoning are done through the Web Ontology Language (OWL), by providing a mapping between SBVR and OWL. In this paper we focus on the problem of mapping SBVR vocabulary and rulebook to OWL 2, but unlike previous mappings described in the literature, we provide a novel and unorthodox mapping that allows to describe legal rules which have their own intricate anatomy.

In the paper problem of business rules modelling in transportation system is considered. We focus our attention on description business domain using business rules. To this end SBVR (Semantic of Business Vocabulary and Rules) approach is considered. Based on examples of two different organizations operating in transport domain we analyze features of SBVR approach. And, at the end, it is discussed the ability of considered approach in the process of model transformation.

Business process modeling has become a popular method for improving the efficiency and quality of enterprise processes. Given the increasing complexity of the enterprise business processes and the richness of modeling languages, the ability to automatically validate a process model is a significant feature provided by modeling tools. This paper proposes an ontology-based approach for modeling and integrating business processes and business rules. It integrates a Colored Petri Nets-based ontology and also a business rule ontology. The integration is automated to facilitate the early detection of flaws and errors and to check the compliance of the business processes and the business rules.

This paper presents an approach based on ontology and agents. The major objective is to automatically manage the consistency of business rules introduced by the experts during the capitalization of business rules process as part of a collaborative system dedicated to experts. The Evaluator agent is at the heart of our functional architecture, its role is to detect the problems that may arise in the consistency management module and provide a solution to these problems in order to validate the accuracy of business rules. It uses the knowledge represented in the domain ontology. We exploit the possibilities of TERMINAE method to represent the company’s business model and manage the consistency of the rules that are introduced by business experts. The suggested approach treats here the cases of contradiction, redundancy, invalid rules, the domain violation and the rules never applicable. We conducted some experiments to test the feasibility of our approach.

Among programming languages, a popular one in corporate environments is Business Rules. These are conditional statements which can be seen as a sort of “programming for non-programmers”, since they remove loops and function calls, which are typically the most difficult programming constructs to master by laypeople. A Business Rules program consists of a sequence of “IF condition THEN actions” statements. Conditions are verified over a set of variables, and actions assign new values to the variables. Medium-sized to large corporations often enforce, document and define their business processes by means of Business Rules programs. Such programs are executed in a special purpose virtual machine which verifies conditions and executes actions in an implicit loop. A problem of extreme interest in business environments is enforcing high-level strategic decisions by configuring the parameters of Business Rules programs so that they behave in a certain prescribed way on average. In this paper we show that Business Rules are Turing-complete. As a consequence, we argue that there can exist no algorithm for configuring the average behavior of all possible Business Rules programs.

Any change in the software based on business logic affects all MDA levels: CIM, PIM and PSM. This paper provides an approach to refine and validate CIM for enabling a premature customer’s validation. We propose a set of rules for generating BPMN Model from use cases model which represent both of them our CIM. This transformation uses SBVR as an intermediate step. Firstly, we generate SBVR model from use case model and its textual description and secondly we transform it to BPMN model. SBVR represents the axe of the CIM refinement cycle, which is based on a natural language that is easily comprehensible and usable by business people and easily can be machine processed. Validated and refined CIM’s achieves a high customer satisfaction, and allowing a better vision of the product as the customer expects.

The article discusses the concept of rules as used in sociological studies, focusing on the categorization of types of rules and addressing an ethnomethodological debate over whether rules can be u...

Emergency of Web services has promoted a new paradigm of a business process which is called the Service-Oriented Business Process (SOBP). The SOBP uses Web services as an implementation platform for activities that belong to a business process, and is modeled with a Business Process Definition Language (BPDL). A de facto standard of BPDLs is the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), but the BPEL4WS requires extra mechanisms to explicitly specify process states in a process model and to separate business rules from process flows. By specifying the states explicitly and separating the business rules, a SOBP gets abilities to rapidly monitor a process in execution time, to efficiently define state-dependent process behavior, to freely change the business rules without modification of the flow, and to firmly guarantee business security by hiding the rules. In order to explicitly specify the process states and to separate the business rules from the process flow, an approach to a state-driven specification of a business process is suggested in this paper. The suggested state-driven approach inserts process states into a process model using process units, and separates the business rules from the process flow by regarding the states as the milestones which indicate where the rules are separated. Because the suggested approach supports a composition of a BPEL4WS executable process by combining the business rules and the process flow, the suggested approach can be used as a complementary design method of a BPEL4WS process model, and not as a substitute method of the BPEL4WS model.

Regulatory compliance of business operations is a critical problem for enterprises. As enterprises increasingly use business process management systems to automate their business processes, technologies to automatically check the compliance of process models against compliance rules are becoming important. In this paper, we present a method to improve the reliability and minimize the risk of failure of business process management systems from a compliance perspective. The proposed method allows separate modeling of both process models and compliance concerns. Business process models expressed in the Business Process Execution Language are transformed into pi-calculus and then into finite state machines. Compliance rules captured in the graphical Business Property Specification Language are translated into linear temporal logic. Thus, process models can be verified against these compliance rules by means of model-checking technology. The benefit of our method is threefold: Through the automated verification of a large set of business process models, our approach increases deployment efficiency and lowers the risk of installing noncompliant processes; it reduces the cost associated with inspecting business process models for compliance; and compliance checking may ensure compliance of new process models before their execution and thereby increase the reliability of business operations in general.

The 5th issue of the journal on Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling (CSIMQ) presents extended versions of five papers selected from the CAiSE Forum 2015. The forum was part of the 27th edition of international Conference on Advanced Information Systems engineering (CAiSE 2015), which took place in June 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden. Information systems engineering draws its foundation from various interrelated disciplines including, e.g., conceptual modeling, database systems, business process management, requirements engineering, human computer interaction, and enterprise computing to address various practical challenges in development and application of information systems. The guiding subjects of CAiSE 2015 were Creativity, Ability, and Integrity. The CAiSE Forum aimed at presenting and discussing new ideas and tools related to information systems Engineering.

Software requirements are usually written in natural language or speech language which is asymmetric and irregular. This paper presents a suitable method for transforming user software requirement specifications (SRS) and business designs written in natural language into useful object oriented models. For sentence detection, tokenization, parts of speech tagging and parsing of requirement specifications we incorporate an open natural language processing (OpenNLP)tool. It provides very relevant parts of speech (POS) tags. This parts of speech tagging of the SRS is quite useful for further identification of object oriented elements like classes, objects, attributes, relationships etc. After obtaining the required and relative information, Semantic Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) are applied to identify and to extract the object oriented elements from the requirement specification.

The roots of business rules come from the Artificial Intelligence community, where they have been successfully applied as a way of representing knowledge. In the knowledge-based systems, the knowledge and reasoning of a human expert can be captured and stored in a form of complex networks of rules. Therefore, the manipulation of the business expert's knowledge generates an imperious need for information security and associated technologies. The notion of cryptography has emerged as a basic concept in the business rules modeling.In this paper, we propose to handle the security aspect by using an encryption algorithm. To do so, we simulate some encryption algorithms such us DES, Blowfish, RC4, AES and RSA.One of our objectives is to provide an original approach for security integration in Business Rules Management System design which should serve all objectives of all parties in the enterprise (Business analysts, Experts, Risk manager, etc). We propose to integrate an agent-based approach in the framework. This solution is utilizing a security agent (SA) with domain ontology. This agent applies an encryption/decryption algorithm to allow confidentiality, authenticity and integrity of the most important business rules.We performed some experiments to find the better encryption algorithm which provides improvement in terms of response time, space memory and security.

A implementação das regras de negócio em sistemas de informação não é uma atividade trivial. Isso acontece porque os modelos utilizados para representá-las não determinam como elas podem ser efetivamente implementadas em situações reais. Neste trabalho é proposta um método para a transformação das regras de negócio descritas em SBVR para um modelo de implementação. Essa tradução é feita mapeando todos os elementos relevantes do modelo em SBVR em um modelo em $\\pi$-calculus baseado em eventos. Neste modelo, existe uma representação explícita de todos os eventos que precisam ser monitorados a fim de identificar quando a regra pode ter sido violada. O objetivo é facilitar o gerenciamento das regras de negócio ao permitir que elas permaneçam separadas dos outros elementos da arquitetura e com isso possam ser gerenciadas de forma independente. The implementation of business rules in an information system is not an easy task. This happens because most of the models used to represent them capture only the meaning of the rules and do not provide means to make them to be effectively implemented. In this work we provide an approach for the translation from a SBVR semantic description of business rules into a implementation model. This was done by mapping all relevant elements of the SBVR semantic representation into a $\\pi$-calculus event-driven model. On this model will be described explicitly all the events that must be monitored in order to identify when some rule may have been violated. This makes the business rule implementation easier because there is a explicit indication of the moment when make sense to do a verification in order to see if any rule was violated. Besides that, it easier the business rule management since the rules stay separate from the others elements of the system architecture and in this way can be managed independently.

Data are the most important asset of an organization. Even though the application or business rules change, consistent data stored in the database must be kept. This research is intended to propose a framework for checking the consistency of an existing database to the business rules in which the data must comply. The research focuses on the situation where the documents of database and the application are obsolete. The rules are extracted from the associated documents (e.g. the decrees) before they are finally expressed in SBVR. Those rules are used for data checker SQL script generation. The automation process is possible if the database has a naming convention and the organization has a standardized vocabulary. The framework has been tested using academic data, where the database has no documentation, and the application is still operating until today. A business rule grammar and SQL query templates are proposed. Data consistency checker tool based on the academic rules expressed in SBVR is developed. The research conducted found data that do not comply with the rules. The contribution of this research is a framework and a tool for data consistency checking.

Business rules can be implemented on business processes, business behavior, people, or software in an organization. Aligned with software development, business rules are captured from requirement elicitation and analysis, then designed and implemented in the software. The changes of business environment may affect business rules. The changes of the business rules may bring impact in the software, so that the software needs to be redeveloped. In this paper, we present a source code generator to automate business rule implementation using business rule approach. We propose a Domain Specific Language (DSL) of business rule to help expressing business rules in a business-friendly language. We also develop a business rule generator to generate source codes based on a DSL script for expressing the business rules. The proposed solution has been tested in two case studies. It is shown that the generator can help the implementation of the business rules in source codes and that the generated code can be used in business applications.

Enterprise information systems maintain a significant number of business rules defining complex business processes and data constraints. Conventional frameworks distribute such rules over multiple layers, making consistent rule location discovery difficult. This lack of rule centrality results in complicated and even error-prone development and maintenance as future application changes may lead to inconsistencies.In this paper, we consider these aspects of business rule definitions in various software design approaches from the software metrics perspective. We research several design approaches in a case study, compare their qualities regarding business rule definitions/maintenance, and demonstrate the difficulties with these approaches. The results of the study indicate that conventional approaches are insufficient in this area. Future design approaches that involve separation of concerns provide mechanisms to address the inefficiency.

In the past few years several business process compliance frameworks based on temporal logic have been proposed. In this paper we investigate whether the use of temporal logic is suitable for the task at hand: namely to check whether the specifications of a business process are compatible with the formalisation of the norms regulating the business process. We provide an example inspired by real life norms where the use of linear temporal logic produces a result that is not compatible with the legal understanding of the norms in the example.