Data Centric BPM and the Emerging Case Management Standard: … · 2012-09-16 · Proposal enables flexible, data-centric approach to BPM Focus on case folder as top-level structural

IBM Research

© 2012 IBM Corporation

Mike MarinIBM Software Group

Richard Hull, Roman VaculinIBM T.J. Watson Research Center

3 September 2012

Data Centric BPM and the

Emerging Case Management Standard:

A Short Survey

| Business Entities with Declarative Lifecycles | 17 Sept 20102

Case Management Modeling and Notation (CMMN): An emerging OMG standard

Responding to 2009 OMG call for proposals

Revised submission planned for November, 2012

10 company consortium

Submitters: BizAgi, Cordys, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Singularity

Co-Authors: Agile Enterprise Design, SINTEF, TIBCO, Trisotech

Proposal enables flexible, data-centric approach to BPM

Focus on case folder as top-level structural mechanism

Permits multiple inter-related case types to model a business process

Behavioral model is declarative, not procedural

Draws on several influences

Case Management literature, including [van der Aalst et. al. 2005]

Business Artifacts: a data-centric approach to BPM [Nigam+Caswell 2003]

Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM): a hierarchical, declarative model for Business Artifacts with formal operational semantics [Hull et. al. 2011]

Dynamic planning for Case Mgmt [de Man 2009]


Agenda

Overview of CMMN

Key influences on CMMN


Case Folders in CMMN: Based on CMIS

Folders, Documents, and Properties for both

Note: All graphical representations are taken from current draft of CMMN proposal, and subject to change

Auto Insurance Claim

CustomerClaim

Police Reports Repair Quotes

Assessor Evaluations Assessor

Summary

Properties include:• Start date• Assessor assigned• Policy applicable?• …

. . .

Properties include:• Number of quotes received

• …

Properties include:• Author• Date• Award amount• …


Top-level Behavioral Model: Tasks, Stages, Milestones

Task: where actual work is performed Can be manual, process (e.g., BPMN), invoke other case

Stage: enables hierarchical clustering of work

Milestone: Business-relevant operational objective

Progression controlled by case worker requests, and by sentries Sentry has form “on <event> if <condition>” (event or cond. may be omitted)f

Launch case & insert claim (manual)

Check customer policy (BPMN)

Collect & Assess Info

Determine Claim Resolution

Enough Info Gathered

TasksTasks

Dependency

Stages

Entry Criterion (“Guard”)

Forced Termination Criterion

. . .

Stages Milestone


Stages and tasks may be “repeating”

This task is repeating New occurrence

launched each time a report is inserted or modified

-

Request appropriate reports

Validate report

Collect & Assess Info

This stage occurs only once


Two styles of dynamic “planning” at case instance level

Request appropriate reports

Determine Claim Resolution

Launch Fraud Investigation

-

+

These are discretionary, and can be included into the plan if the condition governing its applicability is true

Comply with California regulations

Whenever the parent stage is active, the Case Worker can visit the scope list and include applicabletasks and stages into the plan

Planning Scope List. Contains discretionary tasks in stage, that may be planned

Start Exception Handling

• This planning task includes a scope list

• When invoked, Case Worker can include applicable elements of scope list into plan


Tasks, Stages, Milestones, Event Listeners have finite-state machine based lifecycles

Reminiscent of [van der Aalst et al 2005]

Lifecycle for Tasks and Stages Lifecycle for Milestones and Event Listeners


Operational Semantics for CMMN Progress of a Case Instance is governed byExplicit Case Worker requests to transition a Task, Stage,

or Milestone; and to modify Case Folder

Task Completions

Sentries: Entry criteria, Forced Termination criteria, Milestone Achieving criteria• Triggered by incoming events, change-of-state events, and

conditions

For the operational semantics, all of these are translated into Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules

Structure of ECA rules firingAdapted from Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) model for

Business Artifacts [Hull et. al. 2011, Demaggio et. al. 2011]

Incorporate one incoming event, and then fire ECA rules until a fixpoint is reached

Behavior Property Rules (e.g., repeatability of stage, required for stage completion) also present


Agenda

Overview of CMMN

Key influences on CMMN


Case Handling paper [van der Aalst et. al. 2005]

Arguably the first academic publication about case management, including strong motivations

Describes the Case Management meta-model of FLOWer product of Pallas Athena

Activities arranged into a Directed Acyclic Graph

Activities have finite-state machine lifecycles

Activity transitions controlled by ECA rules & position in DAG

Specialized roll-back: If an activity must be re-done, automatic re-do of descendant activities


Business Artifacts: introduced by IBM in 2003[Nigam+Caswell 2003, Kumaren+Nandi+Heath+Bhaskaran 2003]

payment

details

. . . “State” info

Lifecycle specification – might be

• Procedural, e.g., using state machines or BPMN

• Declarative, e.g., Guard-Stage-Milestone or DecSerFlow

A holistic marriage of data and process

Focus on key conceptual business entities that progress though the business

Typically cut across organizations and silos

Info model provides integrated view of biz-relevant info about entity

Lifecycle model describes different ways the entity can evolve

Artifacts interact by messages and/or data exchange

Lif

ecycle

M

odel

Info

Model


Case Management

Emerged in 90’s from Content Mgmt

Growing industrial usage

Traditionally focused on few application areas (social work, legal, …)

Typically focus on a single case type

Handful of academic papers

Recent: “Adaptive Case Mgmt”

Business Artifacts

Emerged in late 90’s from BPM researchers at IBM Research

Growing industrial usage

Applied in broad variety of application areas (finance, supply chain, procurement, …)

Typically 3-7 artifact types for a business scope

~70 academic papers, & growing

Recent: Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM)

Emerging CMMN Standard

• Core CMMN meta-model is based on GSM constructs

• GSM operational semantics adapted to CMMN


Selected Case Management Products

FLOWer, by Pallas Athena (see [van der Aalst et. al. 2005])

See above

IBM Case Manager (see [Zhu et. al. 2011])

Uses a Content Mgmt Repository for case folders

Behavior model based on GSM

Several kinds of events supported, including inserting, deleting, modifying documents

Cordys Case Management (see [de Man 2009])

Top-level process organized as finite state machine

Declarative style incorporated via applicability rules

• Govern which activities within a state/phase are relevant

In dynamic planning steps, case workers decide that additional activities should be included in case instance


Conclusions

CMMN draft proposal unifies concepts from

Academic literature

Key Case Management products

CMMN draft proposal provides constructs that can support Adaptive Case Management

Tasks, (Hierarchical) Stages, and Milestones

Declarative/Rules-based behavior specifications

Rich planning during execution of a case instance

Next revision of CMMN proposal will be submitted to OMG in November 2012

We look forward to the public comment and further enhancements of the proposal


Back up materials

17

Guard-Stage-Milestone in a nutshellDeclarative approach to artifact lifecycles that supports natural modularization and associative “glue-ing”

Initial

Designing Designing

Manu

Process

Analyzing

Financials

. . .

. . .

Engineering

Change

. . .

Part

Engineering

Design

Selecting

Vendors

Can infer flows between stages

• Flows may be specified as “macro’s”: designer draws the flow arrow and system infers guards & milestones

• Can provide visual representation

Open stage when engineering design of all parts is completed

Guards may refer to other entity instances• Connections are declarative; not messages

Milestone: • Biz-relevant operational objective• Specified as event and/or condition

Stage Body: Cluster of one or more activities intended to achieve a (group of) milestone(s)

• Can have sub-stages, or atomic task

• Message flow can be inferred to give visual representation

Financials

OK’ed

Manu Process

Designed

Designed

Guard: Business-relevant indicator that stage should start working

• Connections between stages are declarative, not flow arrows

18

Overview of GSM operational semantics

Business stakeholders view model using local behaviors –at the level of a stage and its guards/milestones

There may be lots of inter-dependencies “under the hood”

The theory provides unambiguous description of how things work

Also, the semantics helps to ensure that non-intuitive things won’t happen, e.g., race conditions; “hidden” changes; changes that aren’t “justified”; ...

A “Business Step (B-step)” is the effect of incorporating one external event and firing all relevant ECA rules

Theory provides 3 equivalent characterizations of semantics

Incremental: applying one “ECA” rule at a time

• Provides natural approach for direct implementation

Fixpoint: precise “top-down” description

• Useful to develop optimizations and alternative implementations, e.g., distributed, scalable

First-order logic: formula describing possible begin/end of macro-steps

• Enables use of previously developed verification/reasoning techniques

• Helps with checking that a GSM model has expected behavior