Article in Proceedings INPROC-2015-56

BibliographySungur, C. Timurhan; Breitenbücher, Uwe; Leymann, Frank; Wettinger, Johannes: Executing Informal Processes.
In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (iiWAS 2015).
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology.
pp. 391-400, english.
ACM, December 2015.
Article in Proceedings (Conference Paper).
CR-SchemaH.4.1 (Office Automation)
H.5.3 (Group and Organization Interfaces)
KeywordsInformal processes; Agent-centered processes; Human-centric processes; Process execution; TOSCA; APIfication
Abstract

Processes involving knowledge workers, such as decisionmaking processes, research processes, development processes, maintenance processes, etc. play a critical role for many organizations because they represent a valuable amount of the work an organization delivers. Therefore, supporting and automating such processes is vitally important for organizations. In our previous work, we have proposed a resource-centric approach called Informal Process Essentials (IPE) to support and to provide a certain degree of automation. The approach enables specifying required resources including autonomous agents of an informal process for accomplishing process goals through creating and initializing IPE models. Initializing an IPE model results in the acquirement of resources that collaboratively work towards the goals specified by the model. In this work, we provide an approach to automating the enactment of such resource-centric informal processes in two steps: (i) integrating resources of informal processes and (ii) executing informal processes. The approach we introduce enables the inclusion of different resource domains, e.g., IT resources, human resources, etc., and resource deployment environments, e.g., OpenTOSCA, Docker, etc. to model and enact informal processes. During the execution, the resources made available through the integration are acquired and engaged for goals of modeled informal processes. To validate the introduced concepts, we apply the approach to a detailed case study that realizes these two steps based on existing approaches and technologies, in particular, the OpenTOSCA ecosystem, an knowledge base, and an APIfication approach.

Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Architecture of Application Systems
Project(s)GSaME
SitOPT
Entry dateFebruary 3, 2016
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