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To construct a business process model manually is a highly complex and error-prone task which takes a lot of time and deep insights into the organizational structure, its operations and business rules. To improve the output of business analysts dealing with this process, different techniques have been introduced by researchers to support them during construction with helpful recommendations. These supporting recommendation systems vary in their way of what to recommend in the first place as well as their calculations taking place under the hood to recommend the most fitting element to the user. After a broad introduction into the field of business process modeling and its basic recommendation structures, this work will take a closer look at diverse proposals and descriptions published in current literature regarding implementation strategies to effectively and efficiently assist modelers during their business process model creation. A critical analysis of presentations in the selected literature will point out strengths and weaknesses of their approaches, studies and descriptions of those. As a result, the final concept matrix in this work will give a precise and helpful overview about the key features and recommendation methods used and implemented in previous research studies to pinpoint an entry into future works without the downsides already spotted by fellow researchers.
The Internet of Things is still one of the most relevant topics in the field of economics and research powered by the increasing demand of innovative services. Cost reductions in manufacturing of IoT hardware and the development of completely new communication ways has led to the point of bil-lions of devices connected to the internet. But in order to rule this new IoT landscape a standardized solution to conquer these challenges must be developed, the IoT Architecture.
This thesis examines the structure, purpose and requirements of IoT Architecture Models in the global IoT landscape and proposes an overview across the selected ones. For that purpose, a struc-tured literature analysis on this topic is conducted within this thesis, including an analysis on three existing research approaches trying to frame this topic and a tool supported evaluation of IoT Archi-tecture literature with over 200 accessed documents.
Furthermore, a coding of literature with the help of the specialised coding tool ATLAS.ti 8 is conduct-ed on 30 different IoT Architecture Models. In a final step these Architecture Models are categorized and compared to each other showing that the environment of IoT and its Architectures gets even more complex the further the research goes.
Engineering criminal agents
(2019)
This PhD thesis with the title "Engineering Criminal Agents" demonstrates the interplay of three different research fields captured in the title: In the centre are Engineering and Simulation, both set in relation with the application field of Criminology - and the social science aspect of the latter. More precisely,
this work intends to show how specific agent-based simulation models can be created using common methods from software engineering.
Agent-based simulation has proven to be a valuable method for social science since decades, and the trend to increasingly complex simulation models is apparent, not at least due to advancing computational and simulation techniques. An important cause of complexity is the inclusion of 'evidence' as basis of simulation models. Evidence can be provided by various stakeholders, reflecting their different viewpoints on the topic to model.
This poses a particular burden by interrelating the two relevant perspectives on the topic of simulation: on the one hand the user of the simulation model who provides the requirements and is interested in the simulation results, on the other hand the developer of the simulation model who has to program a verified and validated formal model. In order to methodically link these two perspectives, substantial efforts in research and development are needed, where this PhD thesis aims to make a contribution.
The practical results - in terms of software - were achieved by using the multi-faceted approach mentioned above: using methods from software engineering, in order to become able to apply methods from computational social sciences, in order to gain insights into social systems, such as in the internal dynamics of criminal networks.
The PhD thesis shows the research involved to create these practical results, and gives technical details and specifications of the developed software.
The frame for research and development to achieve these results was provided mainly by two research projects: OCOPOMO and GLODERS.
Business Process Querying (BPQ) is a discipline in the field of Business Process Man- agement which helps experts to understand existing process models and accelerates the development of new ones. Its queries can fetch and merge these models, answer questions regarding the underlying process, and conduct compliance checking in return. Many languages have been deployed in this discipline but two language types are dominant: Logic-based languages use temporal logic to verify models as finite state machines whereas graph-based languages use pattern matching to retrieve subgraphs of model graphs directly. This thesis aims to map the features of both language types to features of the other to identify strengths and weaknesses. Exemplarily, the features of Computational Tree Logic (CTL) and The Diagramed Modeling Language (DMQL) are mapped to one another. CTL explores the valid state space and thus is better for behavioral querying. Lacking certain structural features and counting mechanisms it is not appropriate to query structural properties. In contrast, DMQL issues structural queries and its patterns can reconstruct any CTL formula. However, they do not always achieve exactly the same semantic: Patterns treat conditional flow as sequential flow by ignoring its conditions. As a result, retrieved mappings are invalid process execution sequences, i.e. false positives, in certain scenarios. DMQL can be used for behavioral querying if these are absent or acceptable. In conclusion, both language types have strengths and are specialized for different BPQ use cases but in certain scenarios graph-based languages can be applied to both. Integrating the evaluation of conditions would remove the need for logic-based languages in BPQ completely.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast-growing, technological concept, which aims to integrate various physical and virtual objects into a global network to enable interaction and communication between those objects (Atzori, Iera and Morabito, 2010). The application possibilities are manifold and may transform society and economy similarly to the usage of the internet (Chase, 2013). Furthermore, the Internet of Things occupies a central role for the realisation of visionary future concepts, for example, Smart City or Smart Healthcare. In addition, the utilisation of this technology promises opportunities for the enhancement of various sustainability aspects, and thus for the transformation to a smarter, more efficient and more conscious dealing with natural resources (Maksimovic, 2017). The action principle of sustainability increasingly gains attention in the societal and academical discourse. This is reasoned by the partly harmful consumption and production patterns of the last century (Mcwilliams et al., 2016). Relating to sustainability, the advancing application of IoT technology also poses risks. Following the precautionary principle, these risks should be considered early (Harremoës et al., 2001). Risks of IoT for sustainability include the massive amounts of energy and raw materials which are required for the manufacturing and operation of IoT objects and furthermore, the disposal of those objects (Birkel et al., 2019). The exact relations in the context of IoT and sustainability are insufficiently explored to this point and do not constitute a central element within the discussion of this technology (Behrendt, 2019). Therefore, this thesis aims to develop a comprehensive overview of the relations between IoT and sustainability.
To achieve this aim, this thesis utilises the methodology of Grounded Theory in combination with a comprehensive literature review. The analysed literature primarily consists of research contributions in the field of Information Technology (IT). Based on this literature, aspects, solution approaches, effects and challenges in the context of IoT and sustainability were elaborated. The analysis revealed two central perspectives in this context. IoT for Sustainability (IoT4Sus) describes the utilisation and usage of IoT-generated information to enhance sustainability aspects. In contrast, Sustainability for IoT (Sus4IoT) fo-cuses on sustainability aspects of the applied technology and highlights methods to reduce negative impacts, which are associated with the manufacturing and operation of IoT. Elaborated aspects and relations were illustrated in the comprehensive CCIS Framework. This framework represents a tool for the capturing of relevant aspects and relations in this context and thus supports the awareness of the link between IoT and sustainability. Furthermore, the framework suggests an action principle to optimise the performance of IoT systems regarding sustainability.
The central contribution of this thesis is represented by the providence of the CCIS Framework and the contained information regarding the aspects and relations of IoT and sustainability.
The goal of this thesis is to create a recommender system (RS) for business processes, based on the existing ProM plugin RegPFA. To accomplish this task, firstly an interface must be created that sets up and expands a database receiving probabilistic finite automata (PFA) created by RegPFA in tsml format as input. Secondly, a Java program must be designed that uses said database to recommend the process elements that are most likely to follow a given sequence of process elements.
The status of Business Process Management (BPM) recommender systems is not quite clear as research states. The use of recommenders familiarized itself with the world during the rise of technological evolution in the past decade.Ever since then, several BPM recommender systems came about. However, not a lot of research is conducted in this field. It is not well known to what broad are the technologies used and how are they used. Moreover, this master’s thesis aims at surveying the BPM recommender systems existing. Building on this, the recommendations come in different shapes. They can be positionbased where an element is to be placed at an element’s front, back or to autocomplete a missing link. On the other hand, Recommendations can be textual, to fill the labels of the elements. Furthermore, the literature review for BPM recommender systems took place under the guides of a literature review framework. The framework suggests 5stages of consecutive stages for this sake. The first stage is defining a scope for the research. Secondly, conceptualizing the topic by choosing key terms for literature research. After that in the third stage, comes the research stage.As for the fourth stage, it suggests choosing analysis features over which the literature is to be synthesized and compared. Finally, it recommends defining the research agenda to describe the reason for the literature review. By invoking the mentioned methodology, this master’s thesis surveyed 18 BPM recommender systems. It was found as a result of the survey that there
are not many different technologies for implementing the recommenders. It was also found that the majority of the recommenders suggest nodes that are yet to come in the model, which is called forward recommending. Also, one of the results of the survey indicated the scarce use of textual recommendations to BPM labels. Finally, 18 recommenders are considered less than excepted for a developing field therefore as a result, the survey found a shortage in the number of BPM recommender systems. The results indicate several shortages in several aspects in the field of BPM recommender systems. On this basis, this master’s thesis recommends the future work on it the results.
Business rules have become an important tool to warrant compliance at their business processes. But the collection of these business rules can have various conflicting elements. This can lead to a violation of the compliance to be achieved. This conflicting elements are therefore a kind of inconsistencies, or quasi incon- sistencies in the business rule base. The target for this thesis is to investigate how those quasi inconsistencies in business rules can be detected and analyzed. To this aim, we develop a comprehensive library which allows to apply results from the scientific field of inconsistency measurement to business rule formalisms that are actually used in practice.