Amelia Bădică, Carmen Radu, Costel Ionascu
Department of Statistics and Business Informatics
University of Craiova, Romania
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015
 Project
Overview
 Project
Methodology
 Current
Status
 Conclusions
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

Organizations – very complex and require
carefully developed models of their underlying
business processes.

Education – an information-centered industry.

DocSys project – interested in analysis and
improvement of document workflows in the
University of Craiova.
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015
Provide a better understanding of the
organization in order to support an increased
spirit of stakeholder collaboration.
 Improve the quality of processes by systematic
detection of the sources and causes of poor
quality.
 Build a fully automated IT solution for the
management of document workflows.

15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

Capture and represent process models using
(semi-)formal languages.

Formalize business process knowledge and its
application for the analysis, verification of
workflows.
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

Define a process design methodology.

Define an appropriate conceptual modeling framework
of business processes.

Define a suitable declarative modeling language for
capturing reusable process knowledge.
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

Case processes – deal with a single instance of a unit of
work = case.

Case management processes – deal with the management of
the flow of cases associated to a unit of work.

Case strategy processes – take a long term view of the
organization with a focus on its case and case
management processes.
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

A lot !
◦ Methodologies
◦ Conceptual frameworks
◦ Modeling languages

Our work is mainly influenced by:
◦ RIVA methodology and Role Activity Diagrams conceptual
framework (Ould, 2005)
◦ FOL-based lightweight business process modeling (Chen-Burger
& Robertson, 2005)
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015




Identify the essential and designed entities that represent
the business of the organization  types of documents that
are circulated in the university.
Decide what business entities represent units of work for
the organization  set of case and case management processes.
Define the dynamic relationships between units of work
 process architecture.
Refine the dynamics of each unit of work  detailed
models of each unit of work + organizational roles.
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

Notation and example
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015




RAD – a container of roles.
Role – groups together activities into units of
responsibility. A Role is defined as a directed bipartite
graph with arcs connecting state nodes with action nodes
(activity nodes, case refinement nodes, and part
refinement nodes)
RADNode – represents a node of the directed graph that
defines a given Role.
State, Activity, CaseRefinement, PartRefinement, Interaction.
They define each type of node of the directed graph that
represents a role.
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015





metaclass(ClassName) ClassName is the name of a class (in
fact a metaclass) from our conceptual framework.
superclass(SuperClass, SubClass) SubClass is a subclass of
SuperClass in our conceptual framework.
class(MetaClass, Class) Class is a class that represents an
instance of MetaClass.
instance(Class, Instance) Instance is an instance of Class.
Process models can be captured in our model as a set of
first-order facts
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

Focus on factual knowledge elicitation about UOWs
addressing document circulation in the university.
◦ Inspect manually document samples
◦ Interview stakeholders for gathering information about the type,
source and destination of documents
 Document scope, i.e. internal or external
 Generic document type, eg. request (application form), report,
notification, agreement, decision, technical note, proposal, minutes, ...
 Document name  mission of the document.
 Sample workflow instance (trace)  list of (role,activity)

Duration: 6 months
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015
document(
4,
internal,
request,
'Studies Interruption Request',
[('Faculty Student'(FacultyName),issue),
('Registry'(FacultyName),register),
('Dean(FacultyName),approve),
('Secretary'(FacultyName),execute),
('Archive'(FacultyName),archive)
]
).
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015
 75
facts: Excel  CSV  Prolog
 Average
 450
 65
sample workflow instance: 6
activities
roles
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015
 Verification
& Validation – a complex set of
activities in the software development
process that are responsible with checking:
 if a software complies with its specification –
Verification
 if it meets the real requirements of its customers –
Validation.
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

Multiple registration.

Bottleneck.
◦ A document must not be registered by more than one
role belonging to the same organizational unit of the
university.
◦ No role can be a bottleneck for document circulation
workflows. A bottleneck role is a role that is
responsible or is a decision point for an excessively
high number of document circulation workflows.
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015
problem('Multiple registration',DocId,DocName) :document(DocId,_,_,DocName,SampleWorflow),
member((Role1,register),SampleWorflow),
member((Role1,register),SampleWorflow),
Role1 \== Role2,
partOf(Role1,OrganizationalUnit),
partOf(Role2,OrganizationalUnit).
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

Early stage of DocSys project at UCV
Preliminary results:

Future work:

◦ Definition of the project methodology
◦ Proposal of an initial version of a process modeling conceptual
framework
◦ Experiment of elicitation of factual knowledge about sample workflow
instances of document circulation.
◦ refine the gathered knowledge, by acquiring additional information that
will allow us to enhance our models in order to define an automated
procedure for obtaining more detailed and accurate business process
models
◦ expanding our conceptual framework using concepts from BSDM,
allows the knowledge engineer to capture explicit knowledge about
business entities and their dependencies
◦ mapping FOL model to other languages – BPMN and OWL
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015
15th Workshop on Software
Engineering Education, Bohinj,
Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015