Integrating location-aware aspects with process flow concerns using Coloured Petri nets.About -----
This website provides information and downloads to enable location-aware process execution with CPN Tools.
Business Process Management has emerged as one of the abiding systematic management approaches in order to design, execute and govern organizational business processes.
Traditionally, most attention within the BPM community has been given to studying control-flow aspects, without taking other contextual aspects into account. Our work contributes to the existing body of work by focusing on the particular context of geospatial information. We argue that explicitly taking this context into consideration in the modeling and execution of business processes can contribute to improve their effectiveness and efficiency.
As such, the goal is to make the modeling and execution aspects of BPM location-aware. We do so by proposing a Petri net modeling extension which is formalized by means of a mapping to coloured Petri nets. Our approach has been implemented using CPN Tools and a simulation extension was developed to support the execution and validation of location-aware process models. We also illustrate the feasibility of coupling business process support systems with geographical information systems by means of an experimental case setup.
References
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Please cite the following references where applicable:
* Zhu, X., Zhu, G., vanden Broucke, S. (2015). 地理空间约束的业务流程建模方法. Journal of Software, 26 (3), 584-599.
* Zhu, X., Zhu, G., vanden Broucke, S., Vanthienen, J., Baesens, B. (2014). Towards location-aware process modeling and execution. Business Process Management Workshops: Vol. accepted. Workshop on Data- & Artifact-Centric BPM (DAB’14). Haifa (Israel), 7-11 September 2014.
* Zhu, X., Zhu, G., vanden Broucke, S. (2014). 地理空间约束的业务流程建模方法. 第四届中国业务过程管理大会. China BPM 2014. Shanghai (China), 17 October 2014.
Implementation
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The architecture of the simulation extension is structured as follows:
You can download a prototype implementation of our CPN Tools Location Aware simulation extension.
* [LocationAware.jar](downloads/LocationAware.jar): CPN Tools simulator extension (binary package).
* [cpnnets.zip](downloads/cpnnets.zip): CPN models for running the experiment.
* [data.zip](downloads/data.zip): additional data files for running the experiment.
Source code, data files and documentation can be found on [GitHub](https://github.com/Macuyiko/LocationAwareCPNToolsExtension). Forks and derivations are welcomed. Please contact us (see contact details below) if you use or extend this project.
Installation proceeds as follows: download `LocationAware.jar` and put this under the `extensions/plugins/` directory in your CPN Tools installation directory, e.g. `C:/Program Files (x86)/CPN Tools/extensions/plugins/`.
Next, download `data.zip` and unpack this under the extensions directory in your CPN Tools installation directory (e.g. you should have a folder `C:/Program Files (x86)/CPN Tools/extensions/data/callcenter1/`).
Finally, download `cpnnets.zip` and unpack to an easy-to-remember directory.
To run, make sure all instances of CPN Tools and the Extension Server are closed. Start the Extension Server: Start → Search for “Start Extension Server”. The log and map windows will appear. If only the log window appears, check the log for errors. Once the map is running, open up `cpnnet.cpn`. Loading in the net can take some time (while CPN Tools checks all arc inscriptions and guards). You can use CPN Tools’ simulation panel to simulate the net and see the effects in the map screen.
To stop: close all instances of CPN Tools and the Extension Server.
Uninstalling the simulator extension is done simply by removing `extensions/plugins/LocationAware.jar`.
Demonstration
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For those not willing to invest time to install the extension, a demonstration video is provided:
Contact
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Contact the authors at:
* [Xinwei Zhu](mailto:xinwei.zhu@whu.edu.cn) (corresponding author)International School of Software, Wuhan University
Luoyu Road 37, Hongshan, Wuhan, Hubei, China * [Seppe vanden Broucke](mailto:seppe.vandenbroucke@kuleuven.be)
Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, KU Leuven
Naamsestraat 69, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium * Guobin Zhu
International School of Software, Wuhan University
Luoyu Road 37, Hongshan, Wuhan, Hubei, China * Jan Vanthienen
Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, KU Leuven
Naamsestraat 69, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium * Bart Baesens
Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, KU Leuven
Naamsestraat 69, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium