Business capability-centric management of services and processes models

With the advent of Industry 4.0, more and more companies are actively working on digitizing their assets (i.e., services, processes, etc.) for better control, collaboration, modularity, analysis, etc. By 2020 more than 80% of companies will have digitized their business processes and value chains. This creates more services and processes, making their indexing, discovery, configuration, etc. more challenging. Thus, digitizing assets needs a data model to describe them together with algorithms for indexing, discovery and configuration.


This thesis details a concept model for describing the business capability of services and business processes from a functional perspective in terms of what do they achieve together with related business properties. Furthermore, this work proposes the aggregation, indexing, discovery and configuration of services and business processes using the concept of business capability.


The first contribution of this thesis is a conceptual model for describing Business Capabilities. The model is implemented as a set of ontologies that can be used for creating semantic annotations of business process models or services. This model is verified using ontological evaluation by mapping its constructs with ontology constructs and verifying there is not an overload or semantic ambiguity. This method has been used for the assessment of relationships in the entity-relationship model. A feature comparison to existing models is performed with respect to three requirements: expressiveness, support for inferencing, use of ontologies and ability to model configuration options. Finally, interviews with domain experts were carried out revealing that the model is simple, easy to adopt and flexible enough to be extended for user requirements.

The second contribution is an abstraction technique that allows moving from an entire process model to its functional description by aggregating the business capabilities of the process elements into a single one. The idea of the algorithm is to traverse the model from an initial node to a final node. Each intermediate node introduces changes to the propagated business capability. The propagation steps are validated using formal semantics of process elements in Petri Nets.


The third contribution of this thesis is to explore the use of Formal Concept Analysis for providing efficient indexing and discovery of business capabilities described using the proposed model. This contribution is validated in a real world scenario for indexing sensor capabilities. A quantitative evaluation is conducted with synthetic sensor capabilities for indexing and discovering 5000 entities. The results show that the indexing and discovery time are less than 200 ms.


The fourth contribution of this thesis is to reduce the business process modelling effort when using configurable process models via an algorithm for creating business capability-annotated configurable business process models that captures configuration options in terms of business capability features. The merging operation realises a compression rate of 50% (by computing the number of nodes before and after the merging).

Team

Wassim Derguech

Dr Edward Curry

Institution: NUI Galway

Funder

Relevant Publications

2020
[16] Wassim Derguech, Edward Curry, Sami Bhiri, "Enhancing the Discovery of Internet of Things-Based Data Services in Real-time Linked Dataspaces", Chapter in Real-time Linked Dataspaces, Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 125-137, 2020. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
[15] Edward Curry, Willem Fabritius, Souleiman Hasan, Christos Kouroupetroglou, Umair ul Hassan, Wassim Derguech, "A Model for Internet of Things Enhanced User Experience in Smart Environments", Chapter in Real-time Linked Dataspaces, Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 271-294, 2020. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
[14] Edward Curry, Wassim Derguech, Souleiman Hasan, Christos Kouroupetroglou, Umair ul Hassan, Willem Fabritius, "Building Internet of Things-Enabled Digital Twins and Intelligent Applications Using a Real-time Linked Dataspace", Chapter in Real-time Linked Dataspaces, Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 255-270, 2020. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
[13] Ninad Arabekar, Wassim Derguech, Eanna Burke, Edward Curry, "Autonomic Source Selection for Real-time Predictive Analytics Using the Internet of Things and Open Data", Chapter in Real-time Linked Dataspaces, Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 237-253, 2020. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
2019
[12] Edward Curry, Wassim Derguech, Souleiman Hasan, Christos Kouroupetroglou, Umair ul Hassan, "A Real-time Linked Dataspace for the Internet of Things: Enabling “Pay-As-You-Go” Data Management in Smart Environments", In Future Generation Computer Systems, vol. 90, pp. 405-422, 2019. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
2018
[11] Edward Curry, Souleiman Hasan, Christos Kouroupetroglou, Willem Fabritius, Umair ul Hassan, Wassim Derguech, "Internet of Things Enhanced User Experience for Smart Water and Energy Management", In IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 18-28, 2018. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
[10] Wassim Derguech, Sami Bhiri, Edward Curry, "Using Ontologies for Business Capability Modeling: Describing what Services and Processes Achieve", In The Computer Journal, vol. 61, no. 7, pp. 1075-1097, 2018. [bib] [pdf]
2017
[9] Wassim Derguech, Sami Bhiri, Edward Curry, "Designing Business Capability-Aware Configurable Process Models", In Information Systems, vol. 72, pp. 77-94, 2017. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
[8] Umair ul Hassan, Souleiman Hasan, Wassim Derguech, Louise Hannon, Eoghan Clifford, Christos Kouroupetroglou, Sander Smit, Edward Curry, "Water Analytics and Management with Real-Time Linked Dataspaces", Chapter in Government 3.0 – Next Generation Government Technology Infrastructure and Services, Springer, pp. 173-196, 2017. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
[7] Wassim Derguech, Edward Curry, Sami Bhiri, "Techniques for Reuse in Business Process Modeling in Public Administration", Chapter in Government 3.0 – Next Generation Government Technology Infrastructure and Services, Springer, Cham, pp. 111-134, 2017. [bib] [doi]
2015
[6] Wassim Derguech, Sami Bhiri, Souleiman Hasan, Edward Curry, "Using Formal Concept Analysis for Organizing and Discovering Sensor Capabilities", In The Computer Journal, vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 356-367, 2015. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
[5] Christos Kouroupetroglou, Maarten Piso, Wassim Derguech, Edward Curry, Jan Mink, Diego Reforgiato Recupero, Massimiliano Raciti, Jesse van Slooten, Daniel Coakley, "Engaging users in tracking their water usage behavior", In Procedia Engineering, Elsevier, vol. 119, pp. 788-797, 2015. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
[4] Sana Baccar, Wassim Derguech, Edward Curry, Mohamed Abid, "Modeling and Querying Sensor Services Using Ontologies", In 18th International Conference on Business Information Systems (BIS 2015), Poznań, Poland, pp. 90-101, 2015. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
2014
[3] Wassim Derguech, Eanna Bruke, Edward Curry, "An Autonomic Approach to Real-Time Predictive Analytics Using Open Data and Internet of Things", In 2014 IEEE 11th Intl Conf on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing, IEEE, pp. 204-211, 2014. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
2013
[2] Wassim Derguech, Souleiman Hasan, Sami Bhiri, Edward Curry, "Organizing Capabilities Using Formal Concept Analysis", In 2013 Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, IEEE, Hammamet, Tunisia, pp. 260-265, 2013. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
[1] Muntazir Mehdi, Ratnesh Sahay, Wassim Derguech, Edward Curry, "On-the-fly generation of multidimensional data cubes for web of things", In Proceedings of the 17th International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium on - IDEAS '13, ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, pp. 28-37, 2013. [bib] [pdf] [doi]
Powered by bibtexbrowser