Multilevel Business Artifacts Christoph Schütz, Lois M. L. Delcambre, Michael Schrefl

Overview ■ Motivation ■ Multilevel Business Artifacts □ Multilevel Object □ Multilevel Object + Life Cycle Models

■ Multilevel Concretization □ Behavior-consistent Specialization □ Meta-process Modeling

■ Metamodel and UML Semantics ■ Discussion and Related Work ■ Summary and Future Work JKU Linz  Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik – Data & Knowledge Engineering

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Motivation ■ Many modeling situations are better represented using multilevel abstraction hierarchies □ For example: Product models are organized in categories.

■ Reflects the often hierarchical organization of the company □ Strategic, Administrative, Operative layers □ Top management concerned with strategic decisions in which markets the company is active; □ Administrative units work on the categories; □ Operative units work on particular product models.

■ The hierarchical levels do not work in isolation but are interdependent and need coordination. JKU Linz  Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik – Data & Knowledge Engineering

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Multilevel Objects + Life Cycle Models

MULTILEVEL BUSINESS ARTIFACTS

Multilevel Object (M-Object) ■ Neumayr et al. (2009) ■ Multiple levels of abstraction ■ For all levels: Class schema ■ Top level: Class instance

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Multilevel Business Artifact (MBA) M-Object + Life Cycle Models

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Coordination of Levels

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Behavior-consistent Specialization, Meta-process Modeling

MULTILEVEL CONCRETIZATION

Multilevel Concretization

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Aggregation

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Instantiation

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Specialization

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Specialization of Life Cycle Models

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Extension

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Refinement

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Meta-process Modeling ■ Concretization is not a one-shot activity ■ Immediately after creation of MBA, only inherited features

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Meta-process Modeling ■ Attributes, methods, transitions, states are added by the modeler

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Meta-process Modeling

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Formal Definition

METAMODEL AND UML SEMANTICS

Metamodel

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UML Semantics Each MBA corresponds to one aggregation hierarchy together with the instance of the top-level class.

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UML Semantics MBA Tour (Top level: range)

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UML Semantics MBA CityTour (Top level: category)

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UML Semantics MBA PacificCityTour (Top level: package)

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Discussion and Related Work ■ In current process modeling approaches, abstraction refers more to the blinding out of details ■ Flexibility in process modeling seems to be an important issue □ Recent paper on process design business entities (PD entities) by Liu et al. (2012)

■ Behavior-consistent specialization of life cycle models □ Yongchareon et al. (2012): Specialization of interactions between process models

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Summary and Future Work ■ MBAs extend m-objects with process models ■ Coordination of tasks at different levels within a company ■ Provide flexibility with multilevel concretization ■ Future work: □ Relationships between MBAs on multiple levels of abstraction □ Information about the actors who carry out tasks □ Implementation

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References ■ Neumayr, B., Grün, K., Schrefl, M.: Multi-level domain modeling with m-objects and m-relationships. In: 6th AsiaPacfic Conference on Conceptual Modeling, 2009. ■ R. Liu, F. Y. Wu, F. Pinel, and Z. Shan. A two-tier data-centric framework for exible business process management. In: AMCIS '12, 2012. ■ S. Yongchareon, C. Liu, and X. Zhao. A framework for behavior-consistent specialization of artifact-centric business processes. In: BPM '12, LNCS, vol. 7481, 2012.

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