University of Twente Student Theses
Business process management in the cloud with data and activity distribution
Duipmans, E.F. (2012) Business process management in the cloud with data and activity distribution.
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| Abstract: | Business Process Management (BPM) gives organizations the ability to identify, monitor and optimize their business processes. A Business Process Management System (BPMS) is used to keep track of business process models and to coordinate the execution of business processes. Organizations that want to make use of BPM might have to deal with high upfront investments, since not only software and hardware needs to be purchased, but also personnel needs to be hired for installing and maintaining the systems. In addition, scalability can be a concern for an organization. A BPMS can only coordinate a certain amount of business process instances simultaneously. In order to serve all customers in peak-load situations, additional machines are necessary. Especially when these machines are only rarely needed, buying and maintaining the machines might become expensive. Nowadays, many BPM vendors offer cloud-based BPM systems. The advantage of these systems is that organizations can use BPM software in a pay-per-use manner. In addition, the cloud solution should offer scalability to the user, so that in peak-load situations, additional resources can be instantiated relatively easily. A major concern of cloud-based solutions for organizations, is the fear of losing or exposing confidential data. Since the cloud solution is hosted outside an organization and data is stored within the cloud, organizations fear they might lose control over their data. In this report we consider a BPM architecture in which parts of a business process are placed in the cloud and parts are placed on-premise. A decomposition framework for automatically decomposing a business process into collaborating business processes for deployment in the cloud or on-premise is developed in this work. The decomposition is driven by a list of markings in which the distribution location for each of the activities in a business process is defined. In addition, data restrictions can be defined, to ensure that sensitive data does not cross the organizational borders. The solution we present is business process language independent. An intermediate model is used for capturing the behavior of a business process and the decomposition is performed on this intermediate model, rather than on an existing language. The decomposition framework consists of a transformation chain of three transformations, used for converting a business process, defined in an existing business process language into an instance of the intermediate model, performing the decomposition algorithm on the instance and transforming the result back into a business process defined in an existing business process language. We analyze possible transformation rules, explain the implementation of the transformations and show an example of the decomposition framework by performing a case study. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science |
| Subject: | 85 business administration, organizational science |
| Programme: | Business Information Technology MSc (60025) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/62490 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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