Data Centric BPM and the Emerging Case Management Standard: A Short Survey

Transcription

1 IBM Research Data Centric BPM and the Emerging Case Management Standard: A Short Survey Mike Marin IBM Software Group Richard Hull, Roman Vaculin IBM T.J. Watson Research Center 3 September IBM Corporation

2 2 Case Management Modeling and Notation (CMMN): An emerging OMG standard Responding to 2009 OMG call for proposals Revised submission planned for November, 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] Business Dynamic Entities planning with Declarative for Case Lifecycles Mgmt [de 17 Man Sept 2009] 2010

3 Agenda Overview of CMMN Key influences on CMMN 3

4 Case Folders in CMMN: Based on CMIS Folders, Documents, and Properties for both Auto Insurance Claim Properties include: Start date Assessor assigned Policy applicable? Customer Claim Police Reports Repair Quotes Properties include: Number of quotes received Assessor Evaluations Assessor Summary... Properties include: Author Date Award amount 4 Note: All graphical representations are taken from Business Entities with Declarative current Lifecycles draft of CMMN 17 Sept proposal, 2010 and subject to change

5 Top-level Behavioral Model: Tasks, Stages, Milestones Tasks Entry Criterion ( Guard ) Stage Stages s Milestone 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 5 Launch case & insert claim (manual) Dependency Check customer policy (BPMN) Collect & Assess Info Enough Info Gathered Forced Termination Criterion Determine Claim Resolution... Sentry Business has Entities form with on Declarative <event> Lifecycles if <condition> (event or cond. may be omitted)f 17 Sept 2010

6 Stages and tasks may be repeating Collect & Assess Info Request appropriate reports This stage occurs only once Validate report This task is repeating New occurrence launched each time a report is inserted or modified - 6

7 Two styles of dynamic planning at case instance level Planning Scope List. Contains discretionary tasks in stage, that may be planned Whenever the parent stage is active, the Case Worker can visit the scope list and include applicable tasks and stages into the plan Determine Claim Resolution Request appropriate reports - Launch Fraud Investigation + Comply with California regulations These are discretionary, and can be included into the plan if the condition governing its applicability is true 7 This planning task includes a scope list Start Exception When invoked, Case Worker can Handling include applicable elements of Business Entities with Declarative Lifecycles 17 Sept scope 2010 list into plan

8 Tasks, Stages, Milestones, Event Listeners have finite-state machine based lifecycles Lifecycle for Tasks and Stages Lifecycle for Milestones and Event Listeners 8 Reminiscent of [van der Aalst et al 2005]

9 9 Operational Semantics for CMMN Progress of a Case Instance is governed by Explicit 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 firing Adapted 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, Business Entities required with Declarative for stage Lifecycles completion) 17 Sept 2010 also present

10 Agenda Overview of CMMN Key influences on CMMN 10

11 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 11 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

12 Info Model Lifecycle Model Business Artifacts: introduced by IBM in 2003 [Nigam+Caswell 2003, Kumaren+Nandi+Heath+Bhaskaran 2003] A holistic marriage of data and process Lifecycle specification might payment be Procedural, e.g., using state details machines or BPMN Declarative, e.g., Guard-Stage-Milestone or DecSerFlow... State info 12 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

13 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 13 Emerging CMMN Standard 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) Core CMMN meta-model is based on GSM constructs GSM operational semantics adapted to CMMN

14 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 14

15 Conclusions 15 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

16 Back up materials 16

17 Guard-Stage-Milestone in a nutshell Declarative approach to artifact lifecycles that supports natural modularization and associative glue-ing Engineering Change Open stage when engineering design of all parts is completed Part Initial Designing Designed Engineering Design Analyzing Financials Designing Manu Process... Financials OK ed Selecting Vendors... Manu Process Designed 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 Guard: Business-relevant indicator that stage should start working Connections between stages are declarative, not flow arrows... Guards may refer to other entity instances Connections are declarative; not messages Message flow can be inferred to give visual representation 17 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

18 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