Exploring Specifications and Monitoring Execution Data of Business Processes

Abstract

The large proliferation of software environments supporting enterprises business processes has lead to a massive data that is receiving a great deal of enthusiasm from the IT managers for its exploitation for various management purposes. Although a lot of work in the business processes field has focused mainly on the modelling and automation aspects, little effort has been done regarding the analysis, optimization and monitoring concerns. In this paper, a new formal approach for analysing business processes specifications and for exploring their associated execution data is suggested. It exhibits two main complementary features: (i) formal specifications describing business processes, expressed as finite state machines, are extracted in order to satisfy useful users needs, (ii) a parametrizable model supporting selection rules that enables querying execution traces of business processes is formalized and illustrated. A real-word scenario is used throughout the paper to illustrate the introduced concepts and formalizations and the proposed approach is implemented and experimented in a software tool.

Keywords

• Business processes
• Finite state machine
• Specification pattern
• Process instance
• Execution path
• Data analysis

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