Evaluating user acceptance of knowledge-intensive business process modeling languages

2023. Amin Jalali. Software and Systems Modeling 22, 1803-1826

Article

Case Management has been evolving to support knowledge-intensive business process management, resulting in different modeling languages, e.g., Declare, Dynamic Condition Response (DCR), and Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN). A language will die if users do not accept and use it in practice—similar to extinct human languages. Thus, evaluating how users perceive languages is important to improve them. Although some studies have investigated how the process designers perceived Declare and DCR, there is a lack of research on how they perceive CMMN—especially in comparison with other languages. Therefore, this paper investigates and compares how process designers perceive these languages based on the Technology Acceptance Model. The paper includes two studies conducted in 2020 and 2022, both performed by educating participants through a course, with feedback on their assignments, to reduce biases. The perceptions are collected through questionnaires before and after feedback on the final practice. Results show that the perceptions change is insignificant after feedback due to the participants being well-trained. The reliability of responses was tested using Cronbach’s alpha. The results of the first study show that both DCR and CMMN were perceived as having acceptable usefulness and ease of use, but CMMN was perceived as significantly better than DCR in terms of ease of use. The results of the second study show that only DCR was perceived significantly better than Declare in terms of usefulness. The participants’ feedback shows potential areas for improvement in languages and tool support to enhance perceived usefulness and ease of use.

Transforming Event Knowledge Graph to Object-Centric Event Logs: A Comparative Study for Multi-dimensional Process Analysis

2023. Shahrzad Khayatbashi, Olaf Hartig, Amin Jalali. Conceptual Modeling 42nd International Conference, ER 2023, Lisbon, Portugal, November 6–9, 2023, Proceedings, 220-238

Conference

Process mining has significantly transformed business process management by introducing innovative data-based analysis techniques and empowering organizations to unveil hidden insights previously buried within their recorded data. The analysis is conducted on event logs structured by conceptual models. Traditional models were defined based on only a single case notion, e.g., order or item in the purchase process. This limitation hinders the application of process mining in practice for which new data models are developed, a.k.a, Event Knowledge Graph (EKG) and Object-Centric Event Log (OCEL). While several tools have been developed for OCEL, there is a lack of process mining tooling around the EKG. In addition, there is a lack of comparison about the practical implication of choosing one approach over another. To fill this gap, the contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it defines and implements an algorithm to transform event logs represented as EKG to OCEL. The implementation is used to transform 5 real event logs based on which the approach is evaluated. Second, it compares the performance of analyzing event logs represented in these two models. Third, it compares and reveals similarities and differences in analyzing processes based on event logs represented in these two models. The results highlight ten important findings, including different approaches in calculating directly-follows relations when analyzing filtered event logs in these models and the limitations of OCEL in supporting event lifecycle and inter-log relation analysis.

Object Type Clustering using Markov Directly-Follow Multigraph in Object-Centric Process Mining

2022. Amin Jalali. IEEE Access 10, 126569-126579

Article

Object-centric process mining is a new process mining paradigm with more realistic assumptions about underlying data by considering several case notions, e.g., an order handling process can be analyzed based on order, item, package, and route case notions. Including many case notions can result in a very complex model. To cope with such complexity, this paper introduces a new approach to cluster similar case notions based on Markov Directly-Follow Multigraph, which is an extended version of the well-known Directly-Follow Graph supported by many industrial and academic process mining tools. This graph is used to calculate a similarity matrix for discovering clusters of similar case notions based on a threshold. A threshold tuning algorithm is also defined to identify sets of different clusters that can be discovered based on different levels of similarity. Thus, the cluster discovery will not rely merely on analysts' assumptions. The approach is implemented and released as a part of a python library, called \textit{processmining}, and it is evaluated through a Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) object-centric event log file. The discovered clusters are evaluated by discovering Directly Follow-Multigraph by flattening the log based on the clusters. The similarity between identified clusters is also evaluated by calculating the similarity between the behavior of the process models discovered for each case notion using inductive miner based on footprints conformance checking.

Evaluating Perceived Usefulness and Ease of Use of CMMN and DCR

2021. Amin Jalali. Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling, 147-162

Conference

Case Management has been gradually evolving to support Knowledge-intensive business process management, which resulted in developing different modeling languages, e.g., Declare, Dynamic Condition Response (DCR), and Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN). A language will die if users do not accept and use it in practice - similar to extinct human languages. Thus, it is important to evaluate how users perceive languages to determine if there is a need for improvement. Although some studies have investigated how the process designers perceived Declare and DCR, there is a lack of research on how they perceive CMMN. Therefore, this study investigates how the process designers perceive the usefulness and ease of use of CMMN and DCR based on the Technology Acceptance Model. DCR is included to enable comparing the study result with previous ones. The study is performed by educating master level students with these languages over eight weeks by giving feedback on their assignments to reduce perceptions biases. The students' perceptions are collected through questionnaires before and after sending feedback on their final practice in the exam. Thus, the result shows the perception of participants can change slightly by receiving feedback, while the change is not significant due to being well trained. The reliability of responses is tested using Cronbach's alpha, and the result indicates that both languages have an acceptable level for both perceived usefulness and ease of use.

Graph-based process mining

2021. Amin Jalali. Process Mining Workshops, 273-285

Conference

Process mining is an area of research that supports discovering information about business processes from their execution event logs. One of the challenges in process mining is to deal with the increasing amount of event logs and the interconnected nature of events in organizations. This issue limits the organizations to apply process mining on a large scale. Therefore, this paper introduces and formalizes a new approach to store and retrieve event logs into/from graph databases. It defines an algorithm to compute Directly Follows Graph (DFG) inside the graph database, which shifts the heavy computation parts of process mining into the graph database. Calculating DFG in graph databases enables leveraging the graph databases' horizontal and vertical scaling capabilities to apply process mining on a large scale. We implemented this approach in Neo4j and evaluated its performance compared with some current techniques using a real log file. The result shows the possibility of using a graph database for doing process mining in organizations, and it shows the pros and cons of using this approach in practice.

dfgcompare: a library to support process variant analysis through Markov models

2021. Amin Jalali (et al.). BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 21 (1)

Article

Background: Data-driven process analysis is an important area that relies on software support. Process variant analysis is a sort of analysis technique in which analysts compare executed process variants, a.k.a. process cohorts. This comparison can help to identify insights for improving processes. There are a few software supports to enable process cohort comparison based on the frequencies of process activities and performance metrics. These metrics are effective in cohort analysis, but they cannot support cohort comparison based on the probability of transitions among states, which is an important enabler for cohort analysis in healthcare.

Results: This paper defines an approach to compare process cohorts using Markov models. The approach is formalized, and it is implemented as an open-source python library, named dfgcompare. This library can be used by other researchers to compare process cohorts. The implementation is also used to compare caregivers' behavior when prescribing drugs in the Stockholm Region. The result shows that the approach enables the comparison of process cohorts in practice.

Conclusions: We conclude that dfgcompare supports identifying differences among process cohorts.

Evaluating a Clinical Decision Support System for Drug-Drug Interactions

2019. Amin Jalali (et al.). MEDINFO 2019, 1500-1501

Conference

Janusmed is a clinical decision support system, developed by the Stockholm County Council that supports physicians in identifying drug-drug interactions. To determine how Janusmed is used in and affects the clinical practice, an evaluation study is currently being carried out that analyzes multiple data sources through descriptive statistics. The study focuses on how Janusmed affects the behavior of the physicians, in particular, to what extent physicians reconsider their prescription decisions based on warnings from Janusmed.

A Hybrid Approach for Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling

2018. Amin Jalali, Fabrizio Maria Maggi, Hajo A. Reijers. Journal of Software 30 (8)

Article

Separation of concerns has long been an important strategy to deal with complexity when developing a system. Some concerns (like security) are scattered through the whole system, and different modules are tangled to such concerns. These concerns are known as cross‐cutting concerns. When the system in question is a business process, cross‐cutting concerns are aimed at being encapsulated by Aspect‐Oriented Business Process Modeling. However, the state‐of‐the‐art techniques in this field lack efficient mechanisms that (1) support composition of cross‐cutting concerns that can be defined in parallel to (a part of) a process model and (2) enable specifying both mandatory and optional cross‐cutting concerns. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a new Aspect‐Oriented Business Process Modeling approach. The approach is hybrid since it is based on declarative rules to relate imperative cross‐cutting concerns and imperative business process models. The approach is explained, formally grounded with precise semantics, and used accordingly to implement the artifacts that support modeling and enactment of business processes in the proposed fashion as a proof of concept. In addition, the approach is evaluated on the basis of the Technology Acceptance Model during a workshop session. The result shows that participants perceived the approach usable and easy to use.

Teaching Business Process Development through Experience-Based Learning and Agile Principle

2018. Amin Jalali. Perspectives in Business Informatics Research, 250-265

Conference

Business process development is a challenging and important task in organizations that enables performing operations more effectively and efficiently. Traditionally, business processes have been developed through waterfall approaches which are described by different business process management life-cycles. Such development requires a lot of time that is one of the barriers to applying business process management in practice. Teaching business process development in the traditional way is also a challenge in education due to the long-running cycle to develop a business process. In this paper, we propose a new approach to teach business process development through experience-based learning and agile principle. The approach is implemented in an advanced course on business process management where students developed a real public business process in an agile way. The study shows that agile business process development not only enables students to automate the business process but also enhance their understanding of business process management.

Weaving of Aspects in Business Process Management

2018. Amin Jalali. Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly (15), 24-44

Article

Separation of cross-cutting concerns is an important issue in business process management, where Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling (AO-BPM) aims to support this separation through a new form of encapsulation technique. Although different researchers have investigated how these models can be designed to support separation of non-retroactive cross-cutting concerns, there is no study that defines the separation of retroactive ones. The lack of a unified definition of the syntax and the operational semantics for these models hinders their enactment in practice as well. As a result, the perceived usefulness and usability of these approaches have not yet been investigated so far. Thus, this article fills this gap by formalizing an AO-BPM language and the semantics that can support enactment of such models. The semantics is validated through the state-space analysis technique, and the feasibility of the implementation is also demonstrated. The perceived usefulness and easy to use of the AO-BPM is evaluated by applying the Technology Acceptance Model during a workshop session. The result shows that participants perceived the approach usable and easy to use.

Aspect-Oriented Business Process Management (Extended Abstract)

2017. Amin Jalali. Proceedings of the BPM Demo Track and BPM Dissertation Award, 1-5

Conference

Separation of concerns has long been considered an effective and efficient strategy to deal with complexity in information systems. One sort of concern crosses over other concerns, which makes their management difficult. Aspect Orientation is a paradigm in information systems which aims to encapsulate cross-cutting concerns to overcome this problem. In the Business Process Management (BPM) area, Aspect Oriented Business Process Modeling aims to specify how this technique can support encapsulating cross-cutting concerns in process models. However, it is not clear how these models should be supported in the whole BPM lifecycle. Therefore, this thesis investigates how aspect orientation can be supported over the whole BPM lifecycle. This thesis has been carried out following the design science framework, and the result is presented as a set of artifacts (in the form of constructs, models, methods, and instantiations) and empirical findings. The artifacts support modeling, analysis, implementation/configuration, enactment, monitoring, adjustment, and mining cross-cutting concerns while supporting business processes using Business Process Management Systems. The use of these artifacts and their application shows that they can reduce the complexity of process models by separating different concerns.

Hybrid Weaving in Aspect Oriented Business Process Management

2017. Amin Jalali. Perspectives in Business Informatics Research, 63-78

Conference

Business processes need to conform with many regulations. These regulations usually cross over many business processes, so a change in one regulation can affect many business processes. To apply such a change, the systems that support these processes need to be audited and changed accordingly. Aspect-Oriented Business Process Management is a paradigm that aims to solve this problem by encapsulating these regulations separately from the core process models. To enact these models, two approaches are defined, named static and dynamic weaving. These approaches support enactment of these models effectively, yet they cannot address the management of non-retroactive regulations effectively. This gap hinders the management of business processes in organizations. Therefore, this paper proposes a third approach called hybrid weaving to fill this gap. The operational semantics of this approach is defined formally, and it is verified using state space analysis technique. This approach enables management of retroactive and non-retroactive regulations by weaving them into core process models at configuration time and run time. The result also enabled us to distinguish a new sort of process flexibility that can be offered when managing business processes.

Supporting Aspect Orientation in Business Process Management: From Process Modeling to Process Enactment

2017. Amin Jalali (et al.). Journal of Software and Systems Modeling (online) 16 (3), 903-925

Article

Coping with complexity is an important issue in both research and industry. One strategy to deal with complexity is separation of concerns, which can be addressed using Aspect-Oriented paradigm. Despite being well researched in Programming, this paradigm is still in a preliminary stage in the area of Business Process Management (BPM). While some efforts have been made to introduce aspect orientation in business process modelling, there is no holistic approach with a formal underlying foundation to support aspect-oriented business process design and enactment, and this gap restricts Aspect-Oriented paradigm from being practically deployed in the area of BPM. Therefore, this paper proposes a sound systematic approach which builds on a formal syntax for modelling aspect-oriented business processes and a Petri-net-based operational semantics for enacting these processes. The approach enables the implementation of software system artefacts as a proof of concept to support design and enactment of aspect-oriented business processes in practice. The approach is demonstrated using a banking case study, where processes are modelled using a concrete notation that conforms to the proposed formal syntax and then executed in a state-of-the-art BPM system where the implemented artefacts are deployed.

The Data Warehouse Lab: A step-by-step guide using SSIS and SSAS 2017

2017. Amin Jalali.

Book

This book aims to help students and practitioners who are new to data warehousing to start developing a new data warehouse project from scratch. It shows different phases of data warehousing projects through a simple case. So readers can experience the full data warehouse development life-cycle through a simple example step-by-step. The book is written for the novice user, so there is no requirement for previous experience of working with MS SQL Server and other tools. However, it expects readers to know basics of databases like the table, columns, etc. The book does not aim to teach data warehousing multi-dimensional design principle, nor play the role of a comprehensive reference book on Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset. It only intends to help readers to gets a hands-on experience on data warehouse development quickly. It aims to give readers basic understanding and experience, so they become more confident in using reference books and online materials. The book does not go through the installation of tools that are used in the sample project. The readers need to install the following tools in order to follow the steps, i.e., Microsoft SQL Server Database Engine, Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services 2017 (SSIS), Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2017(SSAS), Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Power BI.

Towards Capability-Oriented Business Process Management

2017. Amin Jalali. Proceedings of the 2017 International Conference on Software and System Process, 141-142

Conference

Capability management is an important area of research in information systems which focuses on managing ability and capacity in organizations. Business processes play a very important role in capability management, so it is vital to consider the notion of capability when managing business processes. Thus, this paper proposes a new approach to Business Process Management, which is based on considering the notion of capability as a first-class element in the BPM lifecycle. The new approach introduces future directions for the development of systems, techniques, methods and guidelines that empower organizations to manage their capabilities when managing their processes.

Agile business process development: why, how and when — applying Nonaka’s theory of knowledge transformation to business process development

2016. Ilia Bider, Amin Jalali. Information Systems and E-Business Management 14 (4), 693-731

Article

The traditional way of business process development is via creating a detailed model of a business process in question, acquiring an IT-system to support it, and then implementing it in the organizational practice. Acquiring a system can be done via designing and manufacturing it by the business itself, or via commissioning it to somebody else. Alternatively, a generic system can be bought and configured according to the business process model created. The traditional approach has a number of risks that become visible only during the latest phase of introducing the system in the organizational practice, e.g., when it becomes clear that the system does not fit the business and/or people who work in it. These risks could be mitigated by using an agile approach to the development of business processes. In agile approach: (a) the phases of process modeling, IT-system design, and manufacturing are merged into one, and (b) instead of using one big cycle, a series of smaller development cycles is used. The paper discusses what is needed to implement the agile approach, and in which business situations the agile approach is the most appropriate. Examples of tools to support agile development are presented and analyzed. The results presented in the paper have been achieved based on the knowledge transformation perspective along the lines suggested by Nonaka in SECI model. The modification of this model has been used to understand the risks and requirements connected to a particular process development strategy.

Aspect-Oriented Business Process Management

2016. Amin Jalali.

Thesis (Doc)

Separation of concerns has long been considered an effective and efficient strategy to deal with complexity in information systems.One sort of concern, like security and privacy, crosses over other concerns in a system. Such concerns are called cross-cutting concerns.As a result, the realization of these concerns is scattered through the whole system, which makes their management difficult.

Aspect Orientation is a paradigm in information systems which aims to modularize cross-cutting concerns.This paradigm is well researched in the programming area, where many aspect-oriented programming languages have been developed, e.g., AspectJ.It has also been investigated in other areas, such as requirement engineering and service composition.In the Business Process Management (BPM) area, Aspect Oriented Business Process Modeling aims to specify how this modularization technique can support encapsulating cross-cutting concerns in process models.However, it is not clear how these models should be supported in the whole BPM lifecycle.In addition, the support for designing these models has only been limited to imperative process models that support rigid business processes.Neither has it been investigated how this modularization technique can be supported through declarative or hybrid models to support the separation of cross-cutting concerns for flexible business processes.

Therefore, this thesis investigates how aspect orientation can be supported over the whole BPM lifecycle using imperative aspect-oriented business process models. It also investigates how declarative and hybrid aspect-oriented business process models can support the separation of cross-cutting concerns in the BPM area.This thesis has been carried out following the design science framework, and the result is presented as a set of artifacts (in the form of constructs, models, methods, and instantiations) and empirical findings.

The artifacts support modeling, analysis, implementation/configuration, enactment, monitoring, adjustment, and mining cross-cutting concerns while supporting business processes using Business Process Management Systems. Thus, it covers the support for the management of these concerns over the whole BPM lifecycle. The use of these artifacts and their application shows that they can reduce the complexity of process models by separating different concerns.

Exploring different aspects of users behaviours in the Dutch autonomous administrative authority through process cubes

2016. Amin Jalali.

Report

This report demonstrates how storing events in a data ware-house can facilitate mining business process models. The data warehouseis designed based on dimensional modelling principles for the BusinessProcessing Intelligence Challenge (BPIC) 2016, and it is populated by ex-tracting and cleaning, transforming and loading data from the challengelog les. In addition, the data warehouse is stored in MultidimensionalOnLine Analytical Processing (MOLAP) storage format to investigateits potential use. The data are queried based on di erent process cubeoperations, and the result is used by di erent process mining techniques.In this way, the business process models are investigated at di erent lev-els of abstraction. The result shows that it could be bene cial to struc-ture event logs in a multidimensional structure to apply di erent processmining techniques more e ectively.

Limiting Variety by Standardizing and Controlling Knowledge Intensive Processes: Case Study and Reflection on Experience

2016. Ilia Bider, Amin Jalali. 2016 IEEE 20th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Workshop (EDOCW)

Conference

This paper studies the effects of applying process improvement principles to knowledge-intensive processes, which are typical for being supported by Adaptive Case Management systems. The study is being completed by investigating a process of conducting a small-scale research project that results in BS or MS thesis being defended and graded. The research is a mixture of the case study at the department with which both authors are affiliated and reflections on own experience as active participants of the process. The preliminary results show that the improvement principles applied in the project have helped to smoothen the process and improve its outcome in terms of producing defendable theses that satisfy the requirements set by the relevant authority. However, it seems they might not positively affect other outcomes, like the size and quality of research contribution.

Reflections on the use of Chord Diagrams in Social Network Visualization in Process Mining

2016. Amin Jalali. 2016 IEEE Tenth International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS 2016), 51-56

Conference

Data Visualization is an important area of research including different techniques to enhance the capability of people to understand and use data-driven information. The chord diagram is a technique that aims to support the visualization of relations among different participants in a social network. Although this technique is widely used and adopted in many disciplines, it is not currently implemented in Business Process Management (BPM). In this paper, we show the potential of the visualizing social network in BPM area using the chord diagram. The result shows the potential benefits and strength of this technique to discover social network patterns in BPM area.

Supporting Social Network Analysis Using Chord Diagram in Process Mining

2016. Amin Jalali. Perspectives in Business Informatics Research, 16-32

Conference

Data visualization is an important area of research aims to empower people to discover information from data through visual artefacts. The huge volume of data can result in abundance of elements in data visualization, which can make the information discovery challenging. Chord diagrams is a sort of visual representation that has been recently introduced to increase the level of abstraction. Although this diagram is widely used and adapted in many disciplines, it is not currently implemented in Business Process Management (BPM). Thus, this paper extends the social network visualization approaches in BPM area using chord diagram. This paper defines the formal definitions of elements and elaborates on how the visual representation can be compiled from them. The visualization is supported by implementing a plug-in in ProM. The plug-in is used to demonstrate social networks discovered from real log files in compare with those discovered by current visualization techniques. The result shows that this technique can complement previous ones to discover more social network patterns in BPM area.

Creating Self-managed Cross-Professional Teams with Metaphoric Business Process Support Systems

2015. Ilia Bider, Amin Jalali, David Söderström. Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling, 19-33

Conference

The typical values that can be obtained by employing a business process support (BPS) system are optimization, compliance to rules and regulations, leanness, etc. These are obtained by introducing a kind of “conveyor belt” in business processes. While these values can be important for some processes at some phases of the enterprise development, they can be counter-productive for other processes and other phases. This idea paper investigates a possibility of obtaining completely different value from a BPS system, namely it serving as a means of creating self-managed/self-directed cross-professional teams of process participants. The paper suggests using visualized folk and fairy tales and interactive game technology as a basis for building BPS systems that can bring this value. The discussion is done based on the example of representing a consultative sales process using a treasure hunting plot.

Enhancing Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling with Declarative Rules

2015. Amin Jalali, Fabrizio Maria Maggi, Hajo A. Reijers. Conceptual Modeling, 108-115

Conference

When managing a set of inter-related business processes, typically a number of concerns can be distinguished that are applicable to more than one single process, such as security and traceability. The proper enforcement of these cross-cutting concerns may require a specific configuration effort for each of the business processes involved. Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modelling is an approach that aims at encapsulating these concerns in a model-oriented way. However, state-of-the-art techniques lack efficient mechanisms that allow for the specification of concerns in such a way that they can be executed in parallel to other parts of the process. Moreover, existing techniques exclusively focus on the formulation of mandatory concerns. To address these limitations, this paper provides a new approach to encapsulate both optional and mandatory concerns, which can be executed concurrently with other process functionalities. One core element of the new approach is that it extends current Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modelling approaches with declarative rules. The approach is explained, formally grounded with precise semantics, and used accordingly to implement the artefacts that support the enactment of a business process in the proposed fashion. The execution environment is applied to a case from the educational domain to demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the underlying concepts.

Static Weaving in Aspect Oriented Business Process Management

2015. Amin Jalali. Conceptual Modeling, 548-557

Conference

Separation of concerns is an important topic in business process modelling that aims to reduce complexity, increase the re-usability and enhance the maintainability of business process models. Some concerns cross over several business processes (known as cross-cutting concerns), and they hinder current modularization techniques to encapsulate them efficiently. Aspect Oriented Business Process Modelling aims to encapsulate these concerns from business process models. Although many researchers proposed different aspect-oriented business process modelling approaches, there is no analysis technique to check these models in terms of soundness. Thus, this paper proposes a formal definitions and semantics for aspect-oriented business process models, and it enables the analysis of these models in terms of soundness at design time through defining a static weaving algorithm. The algorithm is implemented as an artefact that support weaving aspect-oriented business process models. The artefact is used to analyse different scenarios, and the result of analysis reveals the situations that can introduce different problems like deadlock. In addition, an example of such scenario is given that shows how the artefact can detect the problems at design time. Such analysis enables process modellers to discover the problems at design time, so the problems will not be left to be discovered at runtime - which apply a lot of costs to correct them.

Aspect Mining in Business Process Management

2014. Amin Jalali. Perspectives in Business Informatics Research, 246-260

Conference

Automatic discovery of process models from event logs is an important and promising area in Business Process Management. Process models document how business processes should be performed, so they capture different concerns related to business processes. Some of these concerns are not limited to one process model, and they are repeated in many others as well, called cross-cutting concerns. Although many works have been done to enable discovering different process models, there is no investigation about how models with cross-cutting concerns can be discovered from even logs. Therefore, this work proposes an approach to enable discovering these models from event logs. The investigation is performed based on a case-study from the banking domain. The result shows how these concerns hinder existing process discovery techniques, and how the proposed approach can solve the problem.

Assessing Aspect Oriented Approaches in Business Process Management

2014. Amin Jalali. Perspectives in Business Informatics Research, 231-245

Conference

Separation of concerns is an important topic in Business Process Modeling. One sort of concerns is cross-cutting, like security, which are repeated in many business processes. These concerns make the models more complex, since concerns are repeated in many process models. The repetition of realization of concerns in process models makes the maintenance cumbersome. Aspect Oriented Business Process Modeling is an approach to address these concerns, which has been investigated recently. However, no set of requirements are defined for such modeling proposals, which makes the evaluation of and comparison between these approaches impossible. Therefore, this paper introduces a set of requirements for the aspect oriented business process modeling, which are used to define an evaluation framework for assessing these modeling approaches. The framework is used to evaluate existing aspect oriented business process modeling proposals. The result shows a comparison between different modeling proposals by clarifying their strengths and weaknesses. It also shows the gap in the area, which can be used as direction for future research.

Enacting aspect oriented business process models

2014. Amin Jalali.

Book

Coping with complexity in Information Systems and Software Engineering is an important issue in both research and industry. One strategy to deal with this complexity is through a separation of concerns, which can result in reducing the complexity, improving the re-usability, and simplifying the evolution. Separation of concerns can be addressed through the Aspect Oriented paradigm. Although this paradigm has been well researched in the field of programming, it is still in a preliminary stage in the area of Business Process Management. While some efforts have been made to propose aspect orientation for business process modeling, it has not yet been investigated how these models should be implemented, configured, run, and adjusted. Such a gap has restrained the enactment of aspect orientated business process models in practice. Therefore, this book explain how aspect oriented business process models can be executed in Business Process Management Systems. The result enables separation of crosscutting concerns when enacting business process model.

Towards Aspect Oriented Adaptive Case Management

2014. Amin Jalali, Ilia Bider. IEEE 18th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, 143-151

Conference

Separation of concerns has long been an important strategy in the software systems development to cope with the complexity embedded in such systems. The same type of concerns, like security concerns, is often repeated in many modules of a system, which hinders the consistency, re-usability, change and maintenance of the system. Aspect orientation aims to separate and encapsulate these concerns to solve the complexity problem. This paper introduces the use of aspect orientation for case and adaptive case management through changing the rules that govern business processes on the fly. It introduces a taxonomy of such rules based on the declarative workflows approach. It also shows how so-called form-based case management systems could be extended to support aspect orientation to reduce the complexity problem.

Adaptive Case Management as a Process of Construction of and Movement in a State Space

2013. Ilia Bider, Amin Jalali, Jens Ohlsson. On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2013 Workshops, 155-165

Conference

Despite having a number of years of experience, adaptive case management (ACM) still does not have a theory that would differentiate it from other paradigms of business process management and support. The known attempts to formalize Case Management do not seem to help much in creating an approach that could be useful in practice. This paper suggests an approach to building such a theory based on generalization of what is used in practice on one hand and the state-oriented view on business processes on the other. In practice, ACM systems use a number of ready-made templates that are picked up and filled as necessary for the case. State-oriented view considers a process instance/case as a point moving in a specially constructed state space. This paper suggests considering a case template as a definition of a sub-space and piking different template on the fly as constructing the state space along with moving in it when filling the template. The result is similar to what in control-flow based theories are considered as a state space with variable numbers of dimensions. Beside suggestions to building a theory, the paper demonstrates the usage of the theory on an example.

Dynamic Weaving in Aspect Oriented Business Process Management

2013. Amin Jalali (et al.). On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems, 2-20

Conference

Reducing complexity in Information Systems is an important topic in both research and industry. One strategy to deal with complexity is separation of concerns, which results in less complex, easily maintainable and more reusable systems. Separation of concerns can be addressed through the Aspect Oriented paradigm. Although this paradigm has been well researched in programming, it is still at the preliminary stage in the area of Business Process Management. While some efforts have been made to extend business process modelling with aspect oriented capability, it has not yet been investigated how aspect oriented business process models should be executed at runtime. In this paper, we propose a generic solution to support execution of aspect oriented business process models based on the principle behind dynamic weaving of aspects. This solution is formally specified using Coloured Petri Nets. The resulting formal specification serves as the blueprint to the implementation of a service module in the framework of a state-of-the-art Business Process Management System. Using this developed artefact, a case study is performed in which two simplified processes from real business in the domain of banking are modelled and executed in an aspect oriented manner. Through this case study, we also demonstrate that adoption of aspect oriented modularization increases the reusability while reducing the complexity of business process models in practice.

Multi-Perspective Business Process Monitoring

2013. Amin Jalali, Paul Johannesson. Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling BPMDS 2013, 199-213

Conference

Monitoring business processes is an important area in Business Process Management. This area not only supports monitoring but also enables flexibility. Thus, it has been investigated in many other areas like Business Activity Monitoring, Exception Handling, Aspect Oriented Business Process Management, etc. These areas require to define how a process instance should be monitored from different perspectives. However, current definitions are coupled to control-flow perspective, which applies some limitations. For example, we cannot define a rule to capture situations in which an account balance is read - regardless of its process. To capture such situations, we propose an approach to define monitoring rules. This approach enables composition of rules in a way to be decoupled from a specific perspective. To validate the result, we implemented a rule editor and a monitoring service, called Observer Service. These artefacts are used to support the definition of monitoring rules and track process instances, correspondingly. Finally, we investigated the validity and relevancy of the artefacts through a banking case study.

Supporting Enactment of Aspect Oriented Business Process Models: an approach to separate cross-cutting concerns in action

2013. Amin Jalali.

Thesis (Lic)

Coping with complexity in Information Systems and Software Engineering is an important issue in both research and industry. One strategy to deal with this complexity is through a separation of concerns, which can result in reducing the complexity, improving the re-usability, and simplifying the evolution.Separation of concerns can be addressed through the Aspect Oriented paradigm. Although this paradigm has been well researched in the field of programming, it is still in a preliminary stage in the area of Business Process Management. While some efforts have been made to propose aspect orientation for business process modeling, it has not yet been investigated how these models should be implemented, configured, run, and adjusted.Such a gap has restrained the enactment of aspect orientated business process models in practice.Therefore, this research enables the enactment of such models to support the separation of cross-cutting concerns in the entire business process management life-cycle.It starts by defining the operational semantics for the Aspect Oriented extension of the Business Process Model and Notation.The semantics specifies how such models can be implemented and configured, which can be used as a blueprint to support the enactment of aspect oriented business process models.The semantics is implemented in the form of artifacts, which are then used in a banking case study to investigate the current modeling technique.This investigation revealed new requirements, which should be considered in aspect oriented modeling approaches.Thus, the current modeling notation has been extended to include new requirements.The extended notation has been formalized, and investigated through re-modeling the processes in the case study. The results from this investigation show the need to refine the separation rules to support the encapsulation of aspects based on different business process perspectives. Therefore, the new refinement is proposed, formalized, and implemented.The implementation is then used as a prototype to evaluate the result through a case study.

Aspect Oriented Business Process Modelling with Precedence

2012. Amin Jalali, Petia Wohed, Chun Ouyang. Business Process Model and Notation, 23-37

Conference

Complexity is a major concern which is aimed to be overcome by people through modelling. One way of reducing complexity is separation of concerns, e.g. separation of business process from applications. One sort of concerns are cross-cutting concerns i.e. concerns which are scattered and tangled through one or several models. In business process management, examples of such concerns are security and privacy policies. To deal with these cross-cutting concerns, the aspect orientated approach was introduced in the software development area and recently also in the business process management area. The work presented in this paper elaborates on aspect oriented process modelling. It extends earlier work by defining a mechanism for capturing multiple concerns and specifying a precedence order according to which they should be handled in a process. A formal syntax of the notation is presented precisely capturing the extended concepts and mechanisms. Finally, the relevance of the approach is demonstrated through a case study.

Foundation of Aspect Oriented Business Process Management

2012. Amin Jalali.

Reducing the complexity in information systems is a main concern on which researchers work. Separation of concerns, also known as the principle of ‘divide and conquer’, has long time been a strategy for dealing with complexity. Two examples of the application of this principle in the area of information system design are the break out the data management into Database Management Systems(DBMSs) and the separation of the business logic from the application logic into Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs). However, separation of cross-cutting concerns from the core-concern of a business process is not yet supported in the Business Process Management (BPM) area. Aspect Oriented principle recommends such a separation. When looking into the business process, several concerns, such as security and privacy, can be identified. Therefore, a formal model that provides a foundation for enabling BPMSs to support separation of concerns in BPM area is needed. This thesis provides a formal model for dealing with separation of concerns in the BPM area. Implementing this model in BPMSs would facilitate the design and implementation of business processes with a lower level of complexity, which in turn would reduce the costs associated with BPM projects. The thesis starts with a literature review on aspect orientation both in programming and in the BPM areas. Based on this study, a list of requirements for an Aspect Oriented Service for BPMSs is compiled. Then a formal model for such a service, fulfilling a set of these requirements, is designed using Coloured Petri Nets and implemented in CPN Tools. The model is evaluated through the execution of a number of scenarios. The solution is also validated through an industrial case study. The results of the case study are presented the direction for future work outlined. The case study demonstrates that separation of concerns through aspect orientation does indeed reduce the complexity of business process models.

Operational Semantics of Aspects in Business Process Management

2012. Amin Jalali, Petia Wohed, Chun Ouyang. International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems

Conference

Aspect orientation is an important approach to address complexity of cross-cutting concerns in Information Systems. This approach encapsulates these concerns separately and compose them to the main module when needed. Although there are different works which shows how this separation should be performed in process models, the composition of them is an open area. In this paper, we demonstrate the semantics of a service which enables this composition. The result can also be used as a blueprint to implement the service to support aspect orientation in Business Process Management area.

Service Oriented Modularization using Coloured Petri Nets

2012. Amin Jalali.

Conference

Modelling service oriented systems using Coloured Petri Nets usually results in cluttered nets which are hard to understand and modify. This complexity is a result of many interactions among services. This paper presents a method for designing service oriented models using coloured petri nets.This method results us in less complex nets which could be extended easier.The validation of the method is given through demonstrating its impact on defining operational semantics of a service.

Amin JalaliAssociate Professor

About me

Research projects

Publications

Evaluating user acceptance of knowledge-intensive business process modeling languages

Transforming Event Knowledge Graph to Object-Centric Event Logs: A Comparative Study for Multi-dimensional Process Analysis

Object Type Clustering using Markov Directly-Follow Multigraph in Object-Centric Process Mining

Evaluating Perceived Usefulness and Ease of Use of CMMN and DCR

Graph-based process mining

dfgcompare: a library to support process variant analysis through Markov models

Evaluating a Clinical Decision Support System for Drug-Drug Interactions

A Hybrid Approach for Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling

Teaching Business Process Development through Experience-Based Learning and Agile Principle

Weaving of Aspects in Business Process Management

Aspect-Oriented Business Process Management (Extended Abstract)

Hybrid Weaving in Aspect Oriented Business Process Management

Supporting Aspect Orientation in Business Process Management: From Process Modeling to Process Enactment

The Data Warehouse Lab: A step-by-step guide using SSIS and SSAS 2017

Towards Capability-Oriented Business Process Management

Agile business process development: why, how and when — applying Nonaka’s theory of knowledge transformation to business process development

Aspect-Oriented Business Process Management

Exploring different aspects of users behaviours in the Dutch autonomous administrative authority through process cubes

Limiting Variety by Standardizing and Controlling Knowledge Intensive Processes: Case Study and Reflection on Experience

Reflections on the use of Chord Diagrams in Social Network Visualization in Process Mining

Supporting Social Network Analysis Using Chord Diagram in Process Mining

Creating Self-managed Cross-Professional Teams with Metaphoric Business Process Support Systems

Enhancing Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling with Declarative Rules

Static Weaving in Aspect Oriented Business Process Management

Aspect Mining in Business Process Management

Assessing Aspect Oriented Approaches in Business Process Management

Enacting aspect oriented business process models

Towards Aspect Oriented Adaptive Case Management

Adaptive Case Management as a Process of Construction of and Movement in a State Space

Dynamic Weaving in Aspect Oriented Business Process Management

Multi-Perspective Business Process Monitoring

Supporting Enactment of Aspect Oriented Business Process Models: an approach to separate cross-cutting concerns in action

Aspect Oriented Business Process Modelling with Precedence

Foundation of Aspect Oriented Business Process Management

Operational Semantics of Aspects in Business Process Management

Service Oriented Modularization using Coloured Petri Nets