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EPCletsA Lightweight and Flexible Textual Language to

Augment EPC Process Modeling

By Malinda Kapuruge, Jun Han, Alan Colman and Ulf Ruegg

SCC 2014, ANCHORAGE, AK

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Outline

• Event-driven Process Chains (EPC)• Emergence of Textual representations• EPC Markup Language (EPML)• Limitations of EPML• EPClets• Tool support• Evaluation results• Conclusions

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Event-driven Process Chain

• Represent a process/flow.• Very basic constructs.– Function– Event– Arc– Connectors (AND, OR, XOR)

• Easy to learn.• Few constraints.

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Event-driven Process Chain

• A graphical modelingnotation.

• Used by Graphical modeling tools– ARIS Tool set– Visio– Semtalk

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In a parallel universe…

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Textual representations are emerging for Graphical notations…

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• Allows modifying/defining graphical models using a textual language.

• Agility and efficiency. • Less dismantling/assembling of graphs.– Separation of concerns– Algorithmic graph construction

• E.g., UML Modeling.– UMLets (http://www.umlet.com/)– PlantUML (http://plantuml.sourceforge.net/)

Textual representations

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How about EPC?

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A textual representations for EPC?

• EPC Markup Language (EPML)– Mendling et al., 2006– http://www.mendling.com/EPML/

• An excellent solution to interchange EPC process models. – Export from one tool and import into another.– Describes an EPC graph.

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EPML

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EPML as a textual representation?

• EPML describes graph semantics.– Node* connections– Direction of arcs– Node positioning

• No explicit process semantics.– When the function “order meal” become

executable?– What happens when function “order meal” is

executed?

* Node = Event, Function or a Connector (AND, OR, XOR)

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EPClets• A textual language to augment EPC.• Explicit process semantics (instead of graph semantics).

– The post- and pre-conditions of each business activity– A set of declarative Event-action-event rules

• Graph construction concerns are handled by the EPClets tool.

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EPClets

• NOT an alternative to EPML.– EPML keeps its place as an interchange format– EPML descriptions can be exported from EPClets

• Tool support– An eclipse plugin

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EPClets

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EPClets

• Each declarative EPClets statement in the process description is converted to an atomic graph

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EPClets

• All the atomic graphs are iteratively linked to create the process graph.

• Linking patterns– A linking event has a predecessor or a successor or both?

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Linking patterns

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Advantages• Suitable for heterogeneous and agile process modeling

environments.– Declarative statements can be added or removed– Tool automatically adjust/re-align the graph

• Separation of concerns– User only specifies pre- and post-conditions of a business activity.

• Less error prone – Graph construction algorithm make sure a correct graph is constructed.

• Eye candy – Compact (10 lines vs 300+ lines)– No XML– No graph semantics

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Disadvantages

• Not suitable as an interchangeable format.– Loss of coordinates upon export– The coordinates are determined by the tool upon

import• Typos can lead to broken graphs– E.g., a typo in a pre-condition can make the tool to

assume two different events

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Evaluation

• Controlled experiments• EPClets tool vs Any EPC modeling tool• Participants are asked to – Model a process– Perform 3 adaptations

• The time taken to perform each task is noted.

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Evaluation

38.19 34.17 36.19 28.89

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Discussion

• We observed…• With graph-based approach,– Users spent more time re-positioning graphs– Dismantling graphs can be error prone (syntactic)

• With EPClets approach,– Graph re-positioning is handled by the algorithm– Always produces a syntactically valid graph

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Question…!

• How to integrate an N number of related business processes into one?– (A) Using a Graphical tool (VISIO/ARIS)?– (B) Using textual tool (EPClets)?

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Conclusions

• EPClets is a textual language to augment EPC process modeling.

• EPClets provides the ability to efficiently model and adapt EPC process models.

• EPClets separates the process specification concerns from graph construction concerns.

• EPClets capabilities have been experimentally evaluated.

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Photo credit

• http://addictedto24.blogspot.com/• http://imconfident.wordpress.com/• http://wscounselblog.com/