Amelia Bădică, Carmen Radu, Costel Ionascu Department of Statistics and Business Informatics University of Craiova, Romania 15th Workshop on Software Engineering

The DocSys project: Modeling Document Circulation Workflows at the University of

Craiova

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



Talk Outline

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.



Project Background

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

Project Goals

Capture and represent process models using (semi-)formal languages.

Formalize business process knowledge and its application for the analysis, verification of workflows.



Research Goals

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.



Essential Aspects / Steps

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.



Types of Processes

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)



Related Works

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.



Project Methodology

Notation and example



Role Activity Diagrams



DocSys Conceptual Framework



RAD Conceptual Model

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.



RAD Actors and Resources



Capturing Process Models Using FOL 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

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 months15th Workshop on Software


Current Status

document(4,internal,request,'Studies Interruption Request',[('Faculty Student'(FacultyName),issue),('Registry'(FacultyName),register),('Dean(FacultyName),approve),('Secretary'(FacultyName),execute),('Archive'(FacultyName),archive)]

).



Example

75 facts: Excel CSV Prolog

Average sample workflow instance: 6

450 activities

65 roles15th Workshop on Software


Some Figures

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.



Verification & Validation

Multiple registration. ◦A document must not be registered by

more than one role belonging to the same organizational unit of the university.

Bottleneck. ◦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.



Verification Rules

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).



Example

Early stage of DocSys project at UCV Preliminary results:◦ 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. Future work:◦ 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



Conclusions



Documents

Amelia Bădică, Carmen Radu, Costel Ionascu Department of Statistics and Business Informatics University of Craiova, Romania 15th Workshop on Software Engineering