This paper presents CEFOP (Continual Evolution For Organisational Processes), a method for analysing, diagnosing and evolving the organisational processes. The dynamicity of the business environment requires from organisations to evolve their processes for maintaining their competitive advantage, but this can be time and cost consuming and cause great internal resistance. CEFOP method aims to limit these obstacles by introducing a continual evolution of the process managed in an autonomous way by the actors of the organisation. This approach is particularly crucial for SMEs, which have no internal skills to lead the necessary process evolutions. The CEFOP method adopts the AS-IS/AS-IF approach which allows going out of the project notion by proposing strategies to analyse, diagnose and improve the organisational processes in a continual way. This article focuses on the analysis strategy illustrated with a case study on a ticket support providing process. The case study is provided by Net Invaders, a juvenile French Startup, which is collaborating with us on this project.

During collaborative innovation projects, interactions between actors and knowledge exchange among them have a crucial role to foster innovation. External knowledge can be integrated into the project through different practices. Thereby, to help companies to identify their best practices, it is necessary to find out where and how external knowledge is acquired, transformed and applied in order to better understand the organisational mechanisms by which firms acquire, assimilate, transform and exploit knowledge. To this end, we propose a new participative method called ISEACAP (Identification, Simulation, Evaluation of Absorptive CAPacity) in order to elicit exchanged knowledge during each part of an innovative project and map the knowledge journey from its integration to its application. The outcome of the method will first help the participants (actors of the innovative project) to better understand and improve their practices for integrating external knowledge. Further, it will help us to reach the way organisational routines will be implemented.

A health care protocol for a chronic disease contains a set of actions that describe how the patient should treat his/her disease outside the hospital. The patient and possibly his healthcare team should follow the protocol in order to control the evolution of the chronic disease. The main problems are that (i) the patient can't interact and integrate in the protocol the expertise he acquired during his daily life with the disease and (ii) the health care team doesn't know how the protocol is concretely followed. Our main contribution in this paper is an approach for integrating the patient's expertise knowledge expressed in textual or verbal form, and representing this expertise with an ontological paradigm.

Abstract In System and Software Engineering development, unforeseen changes occurring during process enactment are almost inevitable but often poorly managed due to a lack of efficient mechanisms for spontaneously handling these run‐time changes. We proposed a change‐aware process management system that allows process actors reporting emergent changes, analyzing possible impacts, and notifying people affected by the changes. To this end, we integrated a Change Management Component with a Process Management System. The Process Management System monitors process enactment and uses the run‐time process information to construct a Process dependency graph (PDG) representing the dependencies among the elements of running processes. The Change Management Component captures change requests sent asynchronously, then reasons the PDG to determine impacted elements. Our PDG reflects the information of process instances and therefore can uncover the intra‐process or inter‐processes dependencies that are invisible on process models. We implemented a prototype named CAPE based on the platform jBPM and the graph database Neo4j. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Managing changes for knowledge-intensive processes like System and Software Engineering is a critical issue but far from being mastered due to the lack of supporting methods and practical tools. To manage changes systematically, a process environment is needed to control processes and to handle changes at run-time. However, such an effective environment satisfying these requirements is still missing. The reason is two-folds: first, operational process environments for system and software engineering is scarce; second, there is a lack of efficient change management mechanism integrated in such process environments. In order to address these concerns, we aimed at developing a change-aware process environment for system and software engineering. To this aim, we proposed a change management mechanism based on (1) the Process Dependency Graph (PDG) representing the dependencies among running process instances managed by a process environment ; (2) a Change Observer process to catch change events and update the PDG with run-time information; (3) a Change Analyzer component to extract the impacts of change by reasoning the PDG. In terms of implementation, to gain the benefits from the Business Process Community, where many mature Business Process Management Systems have been developed, we chose jBPM to enact and monitor processes. The key strengths of this study are: first, the PDG makes hidden dependencies among process instances emerge at run-time; second, the process observer inside the BPMS allows to handle the change events in a timely manner. Finally, the Neo4j graph database, used to store the PDG, enables efficient traversal and queries.

In complex domains with features of collaboration and integration, changes taking place in one process may have positive or negative impacts on other collaborative partners and processes. Therefore, supporting changes propagation as well as analysis the impact of changes are desirable functionalities of Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) and have been investigated in many researches. This paper presents a method to analyze the impacts of process changes at run-time in order to help process practitioners deciding to adopt or not a change. We propose an approach based on Process Dependency Graph (PDG) to represent and monitor the dependencies among running process instances managed by a BPMS. When a change happens, we analyze the PDG graph to deduce the affected process elements and then assess the impact of change by using quantitative metrics extended from the workflow Quality of Service (QoS). Our approach thus provides a generic framework that can be adapted to a specific process domain and a BPMS. The work presented here was validated on some processes in Health-care and Software Development domains with the use of jBPM as a BPMS and Neo4j as a graph database to store and traverse the PDG.

Pervasive applications promote a seamless integration of computer artifacts with our daily an business lives. However, they threaten privacy in two ways. Firstly, adaptation to a user's context necessitates a large collection of data. Secondly, context should be addressed when granting users access to information. This paper handles privacy management as an access control problem and argues that privacy should be specified from a global point of view. Investigating privacy specification at a high level of abstraction and its implementation leads to the proposition of a generative approach relying on model-driven engineering. This approach distinguishes a design level for privacy from its execution level. The design level provides a specification language for privacy which emphasizes its contextual features. It is implemented at the execution level as a service composition generated through model transformations. This composition gathers heterogenous entities, such as pieces of software code or devices. The approach is validated on the example of a medical workflow.

Ubiquity in Information Systems (ISs) is a new requirement widely expressed by customers and users due to emerging and evolving communication and mobile technologies. The design of IS dealing with high technological risks requires a precise and appropriate development process which is lacking today. This paper tries to contribute to solving this problem by proposing a process for identifying and modeling ubiquitous requirements that is integrated into an existent IS engineering process. The process is model driven based on a set of model transformations intended to help model refinement and specific platform models generation. This approach is original by the use of an event driven logic as dynamicity and reactivity constitute major required properties from ubiquitous applications. The method is used to create a passenger assistant application in the intelligent transport domain.

Security requirements are part of business requirements, either because they derive from forensic rules, or because they derive from the business logic that should be translated into functional requirements to guaranty that a system meets its users' needs. Extending several notations such as the UML and the BPMN has been proposed as a means to bridge the gap between business processes engineering, security policies design and system engineering. However, a gap remains between these extensions on the one hand and between the large number of access control models on the other hand. Business logic, system engineering and security design thus remain separated when they should be intertwined. In this paper, we address this issue by defining a metamodel for access control to gather the different aspects of access control. We then introduce extensions to the UML et to BPMN that we derive from this metamodel and show that from a business-centric perspective, we can derive functional requirements, and model security to generate actual security policies.

This paper presents a qualitative evaluation of a method for building information systems engineering processes. It includes the description of the evaluated method, the profiles of the selected subjects and the set up protocol. We also describe the results that allowed us to improve the method.

Component-based development methods (CBDM) become largely adopted and used. They replace the traditional methods by the introduction, in their development lifecycle, of two processes: design for reuse and design by reuse. However, these two processes are not clearly established and are combined in the majority of the CBDM. This paper aims to propose an approach to extend a CBDM by the reuse processes, using the Symphony method as a reference. A special interest is given to the reuse of business component for which we propose a conceptual model based on the variability concept that we consider a key property in a reuse process.

Since a component-based information system has different requirements, components customization for various constraints is needed. Thus, the ability of reusable components to be varied and appropriate to different information systems requirements is a key property in reusable component development, especially in business component (BC) development. In this paper, a BC customization approach is presented. In order to do this, we focus on the variability concept, which is defined as the ability of a software artefact to be changed or customized to be reused in multiple contexts. Hence, the objective of this work is to specify business components with the consideration of commonality and variability in a business domain, in order to increase their reusability and applicability.

Patterns systems are becoming more and more numerous. They offer product patterns or process patterns of varied range and cover (analysis design or implementation patterns, and general, domain or enterprise patterns). New application development environments have been developed together with these pattern-oriented approaches. These tools address two kinds of actors: patterns engineers who specify patterns systems, and applications engineers who use these systems to specify information systems. Most of the existing development environments are made for applications engineers; they offer few functionalities allowing definition and organization of patterns systems. This paper presents AGAP, a development environment for defining and using patterns, which distinguishes pattern formalisms from patterns systems. Not only does AGAP address applications engineers, but it also allows patterns engineers to define patterns systems. The same formalisms or items of existing formalisms may either be used in order to facilitate the engineering of patterns systems or to increase the level of reuse.