Objectives:

Nowadays most organizations are investing on automating their business processes as a strategy for continuous improvement and control of business activities. Supporting the continuous process improvement (e.g., reducing operational costs/production time/not productive time/response times to stakeholders, or increasing business performance/users satisfaction/reliability) requires to define, implement, monitor and evaluate measurements in terms of cost (e.g., resources per activity), quality (e.g., services unattended/attended), performance (e.g., duration per activity/process). The automation of business processes can be performed by integrating human resources, technology and data through software known as workflow management systems (WFMS) used to model, implement, execute, and diagnose the corresponding workflow application.The goal of this project is to define new methodologies and technological platforms to automate and measuring the business activities in the organizations. Measuring the business activity supports the decision making process and making reliable predictions to implement control actions (e.g., assigning/replacing human and technological resources, changing process models, offering new services).

This project is supported by the following research areas:

-          Monitoring and measuring of Information Technologies

-          Textual and graphical Domain-specific languages (DSL)

-          Simulation environments

-          Software Product Lines

-          Model-driven Software Engineering

-          IT Integration Architectures

-         Workflow management systems (WFMS)

We have defined and implemented a new workflow diagnosis approach that separates the monitoring and analysis concerns (M&A) specification from its implementation. For this purpose we have implemented a domain-specific language (DSL) named MonitA to specify M&A concerns and process data, making M&A specifications independent of specific workflow technologies, explicit to be easily located, reused and maintained, and workflow data specific. Besides, we defined an implementation strategy to assist developers to create and use a generative infrastructure for an existing workflow technology to support the automated implementation of M&A concerns into workflow applications implemented on that particular workflow technology. Thus, given a workflow application and its M&A concerns, they are automatically integrated by means of the generative infrastructure producing an enhanced executable workflow application. Thereby, M&A concerns specified using MonitA can be automatically implemented into diverse workflow languages and engines.

Overall Workflow Monitoring and Analysis Approach

Main results:

• M&A Specification

DSL description
DSL grammar

• M&A Implementation

Mapping MonitA to BPEL and Padus
Mapping MonitA to JPDL and AspectJ

• Tool Support

MonitA2BPEL – MonitA-BPEL generative infrastructure
MonitA2JPDL – MonitA-JPDL generative infrastructure