Capturing variability in business process models: the Provop approach

Cybermycelium: a reference architecture for domain-driven distributed big data systems

Introduction

The ubiquity of digital devices, the infrastructure of today, and the ever-increasing proliferation of digital products have dawned a new era, the era of big data (BD). This era began when the volume, variety, and velocity of data overwhelmed traditional systems that used to analyze and store that data. This precipitated a new class of software systems, namely, BD systems. Whereas BD systems provide a competitive advantage to businesses, many have failed to harness the power of them. It has been estimated that only 20% of companies have successfully implemented a BD project.

Methods

This study aims to facilitate BD system development by introducing Cybermycelium, a domain-driven decentralized BD reference architecture (RA). The artifact was developed following the guidelines of empirically grounded RAs and evaluated through implementation in a real-world scenario using the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM).

Results

The evaluation revealed that Cybermycelium successfully addressed key architectural qualities: performance (achieving <1,000 ms response times), availability (through event brokers and circuit breaking), and modifiability (enabling rapid service deployment and configuration). The prototype demonstrated effective handling of data processing, scalability challenges, and domain-specific requirements in a large-scale international company setting.

Discussion

The results highlight important architectural trade-offs between event backbone implementation and service mesh design. While the domain-driven distributed approach improved scalability and maintainability compared to traditional monolithic architectures, it requires significant technical expertise for implementation. This contribution advances the field by providing a validated reference architecture that addresses the challenges of adopting BD in modern enterprises.

A survey on modeling dynamic business processes

Dynamic and flexible systems offer huge advantages for businesses in addressing dynamic uncertain factors and implementing dynamic business processes (DBP). However, DBP remains a challenge from the perspectives of modeling, simulation, and implementation because of a nontrivial understanding of "What is a dynamic business process?" A variety of approaches for DBP modeling and implementation have been proposed over the past years, yet few comprehensive studies analyzing DBP from different particular perspectives (e.g., business process (BP) variability, aspect oriented BP, service compositions, etc.) and research questions that lay the foundation for the development of a meaning of a DBP have been reported. The motivation behind this review is to examine DBP meaning from a global perspective and, consequently, answer the previously presented research question. Therefore, in this paper, we present a systematic literature review (SLR) comprised of 67 papers from five respective digital libraries, which index Computer Science (CS), Information Systems (IS), and Software Engineering (SE) journals and conference proceedings. Two points of view are analyzed in the selected papers. First, we observe the similarities and differences between the proposed approaches to DBP modeling and implementation. From these observations, we define six main requirements for DBP (DBPR). In addition, the comparison of the selected papers according to DBPR shows that most of the approaches analyzed limit BP dynamicity, since they use partially predefined BP models. Secondly, we analyze the papers based on a visualization perspective that shows the less explored areas as follows: more flexible process modeling approach and its implementation in IS should be developed; usage of historic data should be extended; domain knowledge usage, like goal-orientation, multi-criteria optimization, domain knowledge, artificial intelligence, etc., should be included and extended to ensure BP dynamicity. As such, this study makes important contributions and serves as a useful resource for future DBP studies and practice. Moreover, we expect that our results could inspire researchers and practitioners towards further work aimed at bringing forward the field of DBP modeling and implementation.

A Pattern Based Method for Simplifying a BPMN Process Model

BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) is currently the preferred standard for the representation and analysis of business processes. The elaboration of these BPMN diagrams is usually carried out in an entirely manual manner. As a result of this human-driven process, it is not uncommon to find diagrams that are not in their most simplified version possible (regarding the number of elements). This work presents a fully automatic method to simplify a BPMN process model document. A two-phase iterative algorithm to achieve this simplification is described in detail. This algorithm follows a heuristic approach that makes intensive use of a Pattern Repository. This software element is concerned with the description of feasible reductions and its enactment. The critical concept lies in the discovery of small reducible patterns in the whole model and their substitution with optimised versions. This approach has been verified through a double validation testing in total 8102 cases taken from real world BPMN process models. Details for its implementation and usage by practitioners are provided in this paper along with a comparison with other existing techniques concerned with similar goals.