Ivan Markovic Semantic Business Process Modeling Semantic Business Process Modeling by Ivan Markovic KIT Scientific Publishing 2010 Print on Demand ISBN 978-3-86644-557-4 Impressum Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) KIT Scientific Publishing Straße am Forum 2 D-76131 Karlsruhe www.ksp.kit.edu KIT – Universität des Landes Baden-Württemberg und nationales Forschungszentrum in der Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft Dissertation, Universität Karlsruhe (TH) Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 03. August 2009 Referent: Prof. Dr. Rudi Studer Korreferent: Prof. Dr. Dimitris Karagiannis Diese Veröffentlichung ist im Internet unter folgender Creative Commons-Lizenz publiziert: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/ Acknowledgements Writing of this thesis was a journey, the success of which would not have been possible without the support and guidance of many persons. Here, I would like to thank all of them. In particular, I wish to thank: Professor Dr. Rudi Studer, for being my Doktorvater and for giving me the opportunity to be a part of the Rudiverse. Professor Dr. Dimitris Karagiannis, for being my second supervisor and provid- ing inspiration through his work on metamodeling. Nenad Stojanovic, for insightful discussions and constructive criticism. Chris- tian Brelage, for raising my interest in business process modeling and a great sense of humor. Ingo Weber, for setting high standards and always raising the bar. Orestis Terzidis, for being the best manager I worked with. All my co-authors and anonymous reviewers, for helping to sharpen the ideas presented here. My students, for their dedication and energy. Colleagues at SAP Research Karlsruhe and Brisbane, for allowing me to become a friend over the years. My family and good friends, for always having faith in me and encouraging me to make this thesis happen. Geli, for unconditional love and understanding. Ivan Markovic Abstract Process orientation was introduced to achieve a holistic view on an enterprise, us- ing business processes as the main instrument for organizing enterprise operations. In this context, business process modeling has become a popular technique for cap- turing business processes. Business process models enable a better understanding of business processes, identify their improvement options, facilitate communication between business analysts and IT experts and serve as a basis for the management and execution of processes in IT systems. As such, they are regarded as valuable design artifacts. However, several important problems in business process modeling have emerged. First, business processes are often viewed in isolation, without explicit consideration of their broader organizational context - business strategy and goals, business directives, etc. Second, the popular tools used for process modeling pro- vide little modeling guidance or reuse functionalities to the user. Third, conceptual process models may contain formal errors which often can not be analyzed on a semantic level. As a result, business process models are decoupled form strategic concerns, the modeling of processes is still highly complex, and the modeling errors are propagated further down the development lifecycle whereby their cost increases exponentially. In order to address these problems, this thesis contributes a business process modeling framework based on semantic technologies. The framework consists of modeling languages, methods and tools, which aim at facilitating the design and improving the quality of business process models. As framework foundations, we first define a process-oriented enterprise ontol- ogy framework in order to integrate all relevant aspects for describing business pro- cesses on a semantic level. Second, we propose a methodology which provides guidance for utilizing semantic technologies in business process modeling. Based on these foundations, we design modeling techniques (languages and methods) that allow for semantic modeling of business motivation, business policies and rules, and business processes. In order to instantiate these modeling techniques, we develop modeling tools for semantic modeling of business motivation (Maestro4BM), busi- ness policies and rules (Maestro4BPR) and business processes (Maestro4BPMN). Quality of the proposed modeling framework is evaluated based on the modeling content of SAP Solution Composer and several real-world business scenarios. Contents I Foundations 1 1 Introduction 3 1.1 Motivation and Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2 Research Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.3 Research Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.3.1 Information Systems Research Framework . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.3.2 Adherence to the Framework Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.4 Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1.5 Structure of the Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2 Basic Concepts and Technologies 13 2.1 Business Process Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.2 Business Process Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.2.1 Perspectives on Business Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2.2.2 Business Process Modeling Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2.3 Semantic Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 2.3.1 Ontologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 2.3.2 Ontology Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 2.3.3 Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 2.3.4 WSML-Flight Language and Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 2.4 Semantic Business Process Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 2.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 II Semantic Business Process Modeling Framework 31 3 Framework Foundations 33 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 3.2 Understanding Conceptual Process Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 3.2.1 Process Knowledge in Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 3.2.2 Process Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 3.2.3 Abstraction Levels in Process Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 3.3 Process-oriented Enterprise Ontology Framework . . . . . . . . . . . 40 3.3.1 Business Motivation Ontology (BMO) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 3.3.2 Business Policies and Rules Ontology (BPRO) . . . . . . . . . 42 x CONTENTS 3.3.3 Business Process Ontology (BPO) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 3.3.4 Business Functions Ontology (BFO) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 3.3.5 Organizational Ontology (OO) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 3.3.6 Business Resources Ontology (BRO) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 3.3.7 Application of the Ontology Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 3.3.8 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 3.4 Semantic Business Process Modeling Methodology . . . . . . . . . . 47 3.4.1 Business Motivation Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 3.4.2 Business Policy and Rule Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 3.4.3 Business Process Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 3.4.4 Business Process Verification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 3.4.5 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 3.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 4 Modeling of Business Motivation 55 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 4.2 Core Ontology for Business pRocess Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 4.3 Requirements Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 4.4 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 4.4.1 Business Motivation Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 4.4.2 BMO-driven Strategic Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 4.5 Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 4.5.1 Maestro for Business Motivation Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . 71 4.5.2 Ontology-driven Design Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 4.5.3 Gap Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 4.5.4 Maestro for Business Queries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 4.6 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 4.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 5 Modeling and Verification of Business Policies and Rules 79 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 5.2 Requirements Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 5.3 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 5.3.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 5.3.2 Modeling of Business Policies and Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 5.3.3 Context-based Policy Matching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 5.3.4 Policy Verification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 5.4 Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 5.4.1 Maestro for Business Policies and Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 5.4.2 Policy Matchmaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 5.4.3 Policy Verificator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 5.5 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 5.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 CONTENTS xi 6 Modeling, Annotation and Querying of Business Processes 101 6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 6.2 Requirements Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 6.3 Preliminaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 6.3.1 π -calculus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 6.3.2 Why π -calculus? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 6.3.3 Workflow Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 6.4 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 6.4.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 6.4.2 Modeling of Business Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 6.4.3 Query Engine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 6.4.4 Soundness Verification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 6.5 Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 6.6 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 6.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 III Finale 121 7 Evaluation 123 7.1 Comparison with Influential Modeling Approaches . . . . . . . . . . 123 7.1.1 Criteria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 7.1.2 Comparative Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 7.2 Enabling SBP Modeling with Solution Composer . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 7.2.1 Conceptualization of Business Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 7.2.2 Representational Completeness of the SBP Modeling Frame- work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 7.2.3 Creating a Semantic Business Process Repository . . . . . . . 134 7.2.4 Performance Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 7.3 Maestro4BPR Evaluation Scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 7.3.1 Access Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 7.3.2 Separation of Duty (SoD) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 7.3.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 7.4 Impact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 7.5 Chapter Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 8 Conclusions and Outlook 149 8.1 Summary of Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 8.2 Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 8.2.1 Extending the SBP Modeling Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 8.2.2 Ontology-based Evaluation of OMG Business Modeling Stan- dards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 8.2.3 From Conceptual Models to Running Systems . . . . . . . . . 151 xii CONTENTS IV Appendix 153 A List of Publications 155 B Business Motivation Ontology 159 C Business Motivation Visual Modeling Constructs 175 D Business Process Ontology 177 E BPO representation of the Simple Merge pattern in Fig. 6.3 181 F Business Policies and Rules Ontology 183 G Policy Recommendation Ontology 185 H Business Policies and Rules Visual Modeling Constructs 187 References 191 List of Figures 1.1 Information Systems Research Framework as defined in [HMPR04] . 7 1.2 Structure of the thesis and recommended reading process . . . . . . . 11 2.1 Business Process Management lifecycle as proposed in [Men07] . . . 15 2.2 Levels of business processes, adopted from [Wes07] . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.3 Concepts of a business process modeling framework, adapted from [Men07] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.4 Kinds of ontologies, adopted from [UG04] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 2.5 An overview of ontology languages. Source: [GHA07] . . . . . . . . 23 2.6 A schematic view of knowledge-based systems, adapted from [dBFK + 08] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 2.7 The critical IT/process divide. Source: [HLD + 05] . . . . . . . . . . . 28 3.1 Process knowledge in models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 3.2 Process perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 3.3 Processes at different levels of abstraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 3.4 Modeling abstraction levels and the mapping to process knowledge . 41 3.5 Process-oriented Enterprise Ontology Framework . . . . . . . . . . . 42 3.6 Ontology layers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 3.7 Semantic business process modeling framework – Fig. 2.3 revisited 47 3.8 Semantic business process modeling lifecycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 4.1 A fragment of Core Ontology for Business pRocess Analysis. Source: [PDdM08] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 4.2 Sample business motivation model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 4.3 Business Motivation Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 4.4 Strategic analysis – sample model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 4.5 Maestro4BM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 4.6 Maestro4BM modeling support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 4.7 Maestro4BQ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 5.1 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 5.2 A fragment of Business Policy & Rule Ontology (BPRO) . . . . . . . . 84 5.3 Business Policy Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 5.4 Business Rule Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 5.5 Matchmaking Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 xiv LIST OF FIGURES 5.6 A fragment of the Business Motivation Ontology depicting different types of matches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 5.7 Maestro for Business Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 5.8 Maestro for Business Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 5.9 Policy Recommendation Menu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 5.10 Policy Recommender UI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 5.11 Graphical Rule Editor in OntoStudio ® [Ont] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 6.1 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 6.2 BPO – Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 6.3 Customer Order Fulfillment Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 6.4 BPO – Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 6.5 Query Designer and Ontology Browser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 6.6 Most commonly used subset of BPMN constructs. Source: [MR08] . . 115 6.7 Scenario modeling and process recommendation . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 6.8 View Process Definition option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 6.9 Business analyst view . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 6.10 Process query view . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 7.1 SAP Business Scenario Map - Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 7.2 SAP Industry Solution Map - Automotive-Supplier . . . . . . . . . . 130 7.3 SAP Application Map - mySAP Supply Chain Management . . . . . 130 7.4 Business Map Conceptualization – Business Scenario Map . . . . . . 132 7.5 Business Map Conceptualization – Application Map . . . . . . . . . . 134 7.6 Business Map Conceptualization – Industry Solution Map . . . . . . 136 7.7 Example Business Scenario – Customs Management for Export . . . 137 7.8 Performance of registering processes to the reasoner . . . . . . . . . . 138 7.9 Performance of querying processes w/ and w/o ranking . . . . . . . 139 7.10 VoIP Order Fulfillment Business Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 7.11 VoIP Business Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 7.12 PersonWOCRMSystemAccess rule depicting the violation scenario . . 142 7.13 PersonWoCustomerAssistantPosition rule depicting the violation scenario142 7.14 PersonWoOrgPosition rule depicting the violation scenario . . . . . . . 143 7.15 Loan Origination Business Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 7.16 Analyze Customer Data & Categorize Customer Subprocess . . . . . 143 7.17 Analyze Customer’s Risk Subprocess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 7.18 Offer Customer Specific Product Subprocess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 7.19 Signing & Funding Subprocess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 7.20 Business rule depicting the SoD violation scenario . . . . . . . . . . . 145 7.21 Business rule for checking if supervisor role is assigned to Choose Bun- dled Product activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 7.22 Business rule for checking if any role is assigned to Choose Bundled Product activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 H.1 Metamodel of the WSML-Flight language based on [dBFK + 08] . . . . 188 List of Tables 7.1 Comparison summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 7.2 Representational completeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 C.1 Visual Constructs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 H.1 Visual Notation for the Business Policy and Rule Modeling Language 189 H.2 Visual Modeling of WSML-Flight Atomic Expressions . . . . . . . . . 190 Part I Foundations