Flexibility and Interoperability have become important characteristics for organisations and their business processes. The need to control flexible business processes within an organisation’s boundaries and between organisations imposes major requirements on a company’s process control capabilities. Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) try to fulfil these requirements by offering respective product features. Evidence suggests that the achievement of flexible business processes and an inter-organisational process control is also influenced by implementation processes for Workflow Management Applications (WFMA). [A WFMA comprises the WFMS and "all WFMS specific data with regard to one or more business processes" [VER01]]. The impact of a WFMA implementation methodology on the fulfilment of these requirements is the research scope of the project. The thesis provides knowledge in the following areas: 1. Review of the relationship between workflow management and the claim for process flexibility respectively -interoperability. 2. Definition of a research-/evaluation framework for workflow projects. This framework is composed of all relevant research variables that have been identified for the thesis. 3. Empirical survey of relevant workflow-project objectives and their priority in the context of process flexibility and –interoperability. 4. Empirical survey of the objectives’ achievement. 5. Empirical survey of methodologies / activities that have been applied within workflow projects. 6. Derivation of the project methodologies’ effectiveness in terms of the impact that applied activities had on project objectives. 7. Evaluation of existing workflow life-cycle models in accordance with the research framework. 8. Identification of basic improvements for workflow implementation processes with respect to the achievement of flexible and interoperable business processes. The first part of the thesis argues the relevance of the subject. Afterwards research variables that constitute the evaluation framework for WFMA implementation processes are stepwise identified and defined. An empirical study then proves the variables’ effectiveness for the achievement of process flexibility and –interoperability within the WFMA implementation process. After this the framework is applied to evaluate chosen WFMA implementation methodologies. Identified weaknesses and effective methodological aspects are utilised to develop generic methodological improvements. These improvements are later validated by means of a case study and interviews with workflow experts.

Knowledge and knowledge work are key factors of today’s successful companies. This study devises an approach for increasing the performance of knowledge work by shifting it towards a process orientation. Business process management and workflow management are methods for structured and predefined work but are not flexible enough to support knowledge work in a comprehensive way. Case-based reasoning (CBR) uses the knowledge of previously experienced cases in order to propose a solution to a problem. CBR can be used to retrieve, reuse, revise, retain and store functional and process knowledge. The aim of the research was to develop an approach that combines CBR and process execution to improve knowledge work. The research goals are: a casedescription for knowledge work that can be integrated into a process execution system and that contains both functional and process knowledge; a similarity algorithm for the retrieval of functional and procedural knowledge; and an adaptation mechanism that deals with the different granularities of solution parts. This thesis contains a profound literature framework and follows a design science research (DSR) strategy. During the awareness phase of the design science research process, an application scenario was acquired using the case study research method, which is the admission process for a study programme at a university. This application scenario is used to introduce and showcase the combined CBR and process execution approach called ICEBERG-PE, which consists of a case model and CBR services. The approach is implemented as a prototype and can be instantiated using the ICEBERG-PE procedure model, a specific procedure model for ontology-based, CBR projects. The ICEBERG-PE prototype has been evaluated using triangulated evaluation data and different evaluation settings to confirm that the approach is transferable to other contexts. Finally, this thesis concludes with potential recommendations for future research. / Computing / D. Phil. (Information Systems)

Submitted by Nayara Passos (nayara.passos@ufpe.br) on 2015-03-10T14:26:26Z No. of bitstreams: 2 DISSERTAÇÃO Natália Cabral Silva.pdf: 2867606 bytes, checksum: 4e1c75788ce8db0420f34c1ca5195e63 (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-11T17:30:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 DISSERTAÇÃO Natália Cabral Silva.pdf: 2867606 bytes, checksum: 4e1c75788ce8db0420f34c1ca5195e63 (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Diante do ambiente complexo e dinâmico encontrado nas empresas atualmente, o sistema tradicional de Workflow não está sendo flexível suficiente para modelar Processos de Negócio. Nesse contexto, surgiram os Processos Flexíveis que tem por principal objetivo suprir a necessidade de modelar processos menos estáticos. Processo declarativo é um tipo de processo flexível que permite os participantes decidirem a ordem em que as atividades são executadas através de regras de negócio. As regras de negócio determinam as restrições e obrigações que devem ser satisfeitas durante a execução. Tais regras descrevem o que deve ou não deve ser feito durante a execução do processo, mas não definem como. Os métodos e ferramentas atualmente disponíveis para modelar e executar processos declarativos apresentam várias limitações que prejudicam a sua utilização para este fim. Em particular, a abordagem que emprega lógica temporal linear (LTL) sofre do problema de explosão de estados a medida que o tamanho do modelo do processo cresce. Embora mecanismos eficientes em relação a memória terem surgido, eles não são capazes de adequadamente garantir a conclusão correta do processo, uma vez que permitem o usuário alcançar estados proibidos ou que causem deadlock. Além disso, as implementações atuais de ferramentas para execução de processos declarativos se concentram apenas em atividades manuais. Comunicação automática com aplicações externas para troca de dados e reutilização de funcionalidade não é suportado. Essas oportunidades de automação poderiam ser melhor exploradas por uma engine declarativa que se integra com tecnologias SOC existentes. Este trabalho propõe uma nova engine de regras baseada em grafo, chamado de REFlex. Tal engine não compartilha os problemas apresentados pelas abordagens disponíveis, sendo mais adequada para modelar processos de negócio declarativos. Além disso, REFlex preenche a lacuna entre os processos declarativos e SOC. O orquestrador REFlex é um orquestrador de serviços declarativo, eficiente e dependente de dados. Ele permite que os participantes chamem serviços externos para executar tarefas automatizadas. Diferente dos trabalhos relacionados, o algoritmo de REFlex não depende da geração de todos os estados alcançáveis, o que o torna adequado para modelar processos de negócios grandes e complexos. Além disso, REFlex suporta regras de negócio dependentes de dados, o que proporciona sensibilidade ao contexto. / Declarative business process modeling is a flexible approach to business process management in which participants can decide the order in which activities are performed. Business rules are employed to determine restrictions and obligations that must be satisfied during execution time. Such business rules describe what must or must not be done during the process execution, but do not prescribe how. In this way, complex control-flows are simplified and participants have more flexibility to handle unpredicted situations. The methods and tools currently available to model and execute declarative processes present several limitations that impair their use to this application. In particular, the well-known approach that employs Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) has the drawback of the state space explosion as the size of the process model grows. Although approaches proposing memory efficient methods have been proposed in the literature, they are not able to properly guarantee the correct termination of the process, since they allow the user to reach deadlock states. Moreover, current implementations of declarative business process engines focus only on manual activities. Automatic communication with external applications to exchange data and reuse functionality is barely supported. Such automation opportunities could be better exploited by a declarative engine that integrates with existing SOC technologies. This work proposes a novel graph-based rule engine called REFlex that does not share the problems presented by other engines, being better suited to model declarative business processes than the techniques currently in use. Additionally, such engine fills this gap between declarative processes and SOC. The REFlex orchestrator is an efficient, data-aware declarative web services orchestrator. It enables participants to call external web services to perform automated tasks. Different from related work, the REFlex algorithm does not depend on the generation of all reachable states, which makes it well suited to model large and complex business processes. Moreover, REFlex is capable of modeling data-dependent business rules, which provides unprecedented context awareness and modeling power to the declarative paradigm.