Knowledge-intensive processes progress towards the achievement of operational goals. These processes typically rely on data to enable data-driven decision making, but also require substantial flexibility to deal with the complex and dynamic environments in which they operate. Consequently, declarative data-centric process modeling languages such as the Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) have been proposed to model knowledge-intensive processes. However, while such process models allow to express goals, they specify dependencies between the goals only implicitly. This makes the goal-oriented behavior of declarative data-centric process models hard to understand, and therefore obfuscates the goal-oriented behavior of knowledge-intensive processes. This paper defines a structural, semi-automated approach to explicate the goal-oriented aspects of declarative data-centric process models. The approach first derives goal relations from a declarative data-centric process model and next synthesizes these goal relations into a goal model using an algorithm. The approach is supported by a tool and has been evaluated in case studies. Using the approach, implicit goal dependencies in declarative data-centric process models are expressed in goal models. This supports the understanding of goal-oriented aspects of declarative data-centric process models.

Declarative artifact-centric process models are suitable for specifying knowledge-intensive processes. Currently, such models need to be designed from scratch, even though existing model fragments could be reused to gain efficiency in designing and maintaining declarative artifact-centric process models. To address this problem, this paper proposes an approach for composing model fragments, abstracted into features, into fully specified declarative artifact-centric process models. We use Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) schemas as modeling language and let each feature denote a GSM schema fragment. The approach supports feature composition at different levels of granularity. Permutability of features is analyzed. Syntactic conditions that ensure permutability are defined and refactoring of non-permutable into permutable features is discussed. The approach has been evaluated by implementing it in a tool based on the Case Management Model Notation (CMMN) and applying it to three real-world processes. Using the approach, declarative artifact-centric process models can be composed from existing model fragments in an efficient, robust and correct way.

In many business processes, knowledge workers collect information and make decisions about business entities. Artifact-centric process (ACP) models have been proposed to represent such knowledge-intensive processes. Declarative ACP models use precise business rules to define flexible process executions. However, in many business situations knowledge experts have to deal with uncertainty and vagueness. Currently, how to deal with such situations cannot be expressed in declarative ACP models. We propose to use the fuzzy logic framework to model uncertainty in such models. Using Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) schemas as declarative ACP notation, we show how GSM schemas can be adapted for modeling gradual progress of real-life knowledge-intensive processes via a fuzzy logic interface. We evaluate the proposed fuzzy GSM schemas in real-life scenarios of airport ground operations and healthcare services.

Competition in today’s globalized markets forces organizations to collaborate within dynamic business networks to provide mass-customized integrated solutions for customers. The collaboration within dynamic business networks necessitates forming dynamic networked business processes (DNBPs). Networked business processes need to be supported by high quality information that is exchanged in a trustworthy environment. Information governance (IG) is described as a holistic approach to different mechanisms that support high quality and secure information exchanges. However, dynamism of networked business processes causes IG issues like unsecured information access and low quality information products to emerge. In this paper, a comprehensive list of the IG issues in DNBPs is identified through structured steps. The identified IG issues are characterized within four main categories, respectively, information product quality, information service quality, information security, and metadata issues. For the evaluation of the practical significance of the identified IG issues, a case study is conducted in a business network that provides mobility solutions. In this way, the paper closes the gap between studies on IG, which have mostly concentrated on IG within the borders of a single organization or IG in stable business networks, and studies on dynamic business networks, which have addressed the formation of dynamic inter-organizational interactions without paying rigorous attention to information artefacts that are exchanged.

Most service composition approaches rely on top-down decomposition of a problem and AI-style planning to assemble service components into a meaningful whole, impeding reuse and flexibility. In this article, we propose an approach that starts from declarative knowledge about the semantics of individual service components and algorithmically constructs a full-blown service orchestration process that supports sequence, choice, and parallelism. The output of our algorithm can be mapped directly into a number of service orchestration languages such as OWL-S and BPEL. The approach consists of two steps. First, semantic links specifying data dependencies among the services are derived and organized in a flexible network. Second, based on a user request indicating the desired outcomes from the composition, an executable composition is constructed from the network that satisfies the dependencies. The approach is unique in producing complex compositions out of semantic links between services in a flexible way. It also allows reusing knowledge about semantic dependencies in the network to generate new compositions through new requests and modification of services at runtime. The approach has been implemented in a prototype that outperforms related composition prototypes in experiments.

Business chains increasingly rely on the dynamic integration of business processes of different partners. The interaction constraints that result from the business processes are captured in business protocols. Since the business protocols of each partner support its own way of working, the business protocols can easily mismatch, which hinders organizations from forming a business chain. Such mismatches can be resolved by protocol adaptors. In this paper, we show how protocol adaptors can be used to enable the flexible formation of business chains. For different types of business chains, we present formation cases that describe which partners are responsible for the construction and operation of protocol adaptors. Next, we present for each formation case an accompanying concrete software architecture that realizes the case. The presented software architectures support the flexible formation of business chains and use protocol adaptation as a key component. We show the feasibility of the approach by discussing a prototype implementation, which we apply to a case study from the healthcare domain.

Service composition languages like BPEL and many enactment tools only support structured process models, but most service composition approaches only consider unstructured process models. This paper defines an efficient algorithm that composes a set of cooperative services with their dependencies into a structured process. The algorithm takes as input a dependency graph and returns a structured process model that orchestrates the services while respecting their dependencies. The algorithm is embedded in a lightweight, semi-automated service composition approach, in which first dependencies between services are derived in a semi-automated way and next the algorithm is used to construct a structured composition. The approach has been implemented in a prototype that supports the dynamic formation and collaboration of dynamic virtual enterprises using cross-organizational service-oriented technology.