Manufacturers are coping with increasing pressures in quality, cost and efficiency as more and more industries are moving from traditional setup to industry 4.0 based digitally transformed setup due to its numerous playbacks. Within the manufacturing domain organizational structures and processes are complex, therefore adopting industry 4.0 and finding an optimized re-engineered business process is difficult without using a systematic methodology. Authors have developed Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) and Business Process Optimization (BPO) methods but no consolidated methodology have been seen in the literature that is based on industry 4.0 and incorporates both the BPR and BPO. We have presented a consolidated and systematic re-engineering and optimization framework for a manufacturing industry setup. The proposed framework performs Evolutionary Multi-Objective Combinatorial Optimization using Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA). An example process from an aircraft manufacturing factory has been optimized and re-engineered with available set of technologies from industry 4.0 based on the criteria of lower cost, reduced processing time and reduced error rate. At the end to validate the proposed framework Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is used for simulations and perform comparison between AS-IS and TO-BE processes as it is widely used standard for business process specification. The proposed framework will be used in converting an industry from traditional setup to industry 4.0 resulting in cost reduction, increased performance and quality.

Business process similarity measure is required by many applications, such as business process query, improvement, redesign, and etc. Many process behavior similarity measures have been proposed in the past two decades. However, to the best of our knowledge, most existing work only focuses on the direct causality transition relations and totally neglect the concurrent and transitive transition relations that are proved to be equally important when measuring process behavior similarity. In this paper, we take the weakness of existing process behavior similarity measures as a starting point, and propose a comprehensive approach to measure the business process behavior similarity based on the so-called Extended Transition Relation set, ETR-set for short. Essentially, the ETR-set is an ex-tended transition relation set containing direct causal transition relations, minimum concurrent transition relations and transitive causal transition relations. Based on the ETR-set, a novel process behavior similarity measure is defined. By constructing a concurrent reachability graph, our approach finds an effective technique to obtain the ETR-set. Finally, we evaluate our proposed approach in terms of its property analysis as well as conducting a group of control experiments.

As a result of large-scale and complicated of ICT (Information and Communication Technology), the technologies of operations and management of ICT infrastructure and systems are changing to adopt the variation and diversity of usage and communication characteristics. In retrospect, operations and management technologies cover widely from the support of telecommunications operations and remote monitoring for maintaining network equipments, to an integrated network management framework for configuration, monitoring, testing and controls. Recently, the spread of network virtualization technologies enable agility, integrity, and resilience to ICT services. Operations and management technologies will be more important in future, for the support of integrated management of ICT infrastructure including computing resource, and automation of service operations. In this paper, we review research activities of the Technical Committee on Information and Communications Management (ICM) with discussions of individual research category. We then describe the state-of-the-art topics and future directions in the area of ICM.

Collaborative business has been increasingly developing with the environment of globalization and advanced information technologies. In a collaboration environment with multiple organizations, participants from different organizations always have different views about modeling the overall business process due to different knowledge and cultural backgrounds. Moreover, flexible support, privacy preservation and process reuse are important issues that should be considered in business process management across organizational boundaries. This paper presents a novel approach of modeling interorganizational business process for collaboration. Our approach allows for modeling loosely coupled interorganizational business process considering different views of organizations. In the proposed model, organizations have their own local process views of modeling business process instead of sharing pre-defined global processes. During process cooperation, local process of an organization can be invisible to other organizations. Further, we propose the coordination mechanisms for different local process views to detect incompatibilities among organizations. We illustrate our proposed approach by a case study of interorganizational software development collaboration.

As business values pursued by today's organizations are abstract concepts, measurement of these values and their achievement is not straightforward. This paper proposes a value achievement measuring and managing framework, which recursively decomposes business values to construct a value hierarchy and then links it with the business process hierarchy. The framework makes it possible to measure value achievement, trace values to processes, and take necessary actions in response to the measured progress in value achievement.

It has been an important issue to deal with risks in business processes for achieving companies' goals. This paper introduces a method for applying a formal method to analysis of risks and control activities in business processes in order to evaluate control activities consistently, exhaustively, and to give us potential to have scientific discussion on the result of the evaluation. We focus on document flows in business activities and control activities and risks related to documents because documents play important roles in business. In our method, document flows including control activities are modeled and it is verified by OTS/CafeOBJ Method that risks about falsification of documents are avoided by control activities in the model. The verification is done by interaction between humans and CafeOBJ system with theorem proving, and it raises potential to discuss the result scientifically because the interaction gives us rigorous reasons why the result is derived from the verification.

Workflow technology has spread over the wide areas which require process control (e.g. logistics and e-business) or resource coordination (e.g. cooperative work and grid computing). Among various types of workflow, we introduce a case of ad-hoc workflow process in a Korean telecom company. Since such a service process is generally accompanied with customer's participation, the procedure and state are flexibly changed and sometimes capricious to cope with customer's request and operator's unexpected situation. In case of network service provisioning or problem shooting processes, customers often request the changes of their service types or visit appointments, which result in flexible and adaptive management of the process instances. In this paper, we present a novel approach to workflow modeling based on modified ECA rules (named P-ECA) for the purpose of ad-hoc workflow process modeling. The rule-based workflow modeling is comprehensible to engineers and can be implemented in programs at ease; therefore it is expected that it can be widely adopted for the ad-hoc and adaptive workflow modeling which requires dynamic changes of its states by internal or external events.

Business Processes are considered a crucial issue by many enterprises because they are the key to maintain competitiveness. Moreover, business processes are important for software developers, since they can capture from them the necessary requirements for software design and creation. Besides, business process modeling is the center for conducting and improving how the business is operated. Security is important for business performance, but traditionally, it is considered after the business processes definition. Empirical studies show that, at the business process level, customers, end users, and business analysts are able to express their security needs. In this work, we will present a proposal aimed at integrating security requirements through business process modeling. We will summarize our Business Process Modeling Notation extension for modeling secure business process through Business Process Diagrams, and we will apply this approach to a typical health-care business process.

Successful e-commerce presupposes techniques by which autonomous trading entities can interoperate. Although progress has been made on data exchange and payment protocols, interoperation in the face of autonomy is still inadequately understood. Current techniques, designed for closed environments, support only the simplest interactions. We develop a multiagent approach for interoperation of business process in e-commerce. This approach consists of (1) a behavioral model to specify autonomous, heterogeneous agents representing different trading entities (businesses, consumers, brokers), (2) a metamodel that provides a language (based on XML) for specifying a variety of service agreements and accommodating exceptions and revisions, and (3) an execution architecture that supports persistent and dynamic (re)execution.

It is one of the difficulties in enterprise modeling that we must deal with many fragmented pieces of knowledge provided by various domain-experts, which are usually based on mutually different viewpoints of them. This paper presents a formal approach to integrate those pieces into enterprise-wide model units using Rough Set Theory (RST). We focus on business processes in order to recognize and identify the constituents or units of enterprise models, which would compose the model expressing the various aspects of the enterprise. We defined five model unit types of "resource," "organization," "task," "function," and "behavior. " The first three types represent the static aspect of the enterprise, whereas the last two types represent the dynamic aspect of it. Those units are initially elicited from each domain-expert as his/her own individual model units, then they are integrated into enterprise-wide units using RST. Our approach is methodology-free, and any methodologies can include it in their early stage to identify what composes the enterprise.

Adaptability evaluation of software systems is one of the key concerns in both software engineering and requirements engineering. In this paper, we present a formal and systematic approach to evaluate adaptability of software systems to requirements in enterprise business applications. Our approach consists of three major parts, that is, the common modeling method for both business realms and software realms, functional adaptability evaluation between the models with Σ algebra and behavioral adaptability evaluation with process algebra. By our approach, one can rigorously and uniquely determine whether a software system is adaptable to the requirements, either totally or partially. A sample application from an order processing is illustrated to show how this approach is effective in solving the adaptability evolution problem.

As telecommunications companies face the rigors of competition, they soon find that their operational support systems play a critical role in providing new services faster, at lower cost and with better quality than their competitors. At TeleManagement Forum, the model for the successful service provider is 'the smooth operator' - a company whose processes and systems fully support its people to provide the best services possible at the lowest cost. Learning the importance of becoming a 'smooth operator' is hard, particularly as it requires giving up the old way of doing things - moving from an internal development environment to one that can take full advantage of 'off-the-shelf' software. The reasons for this shift include a shortage of resources, shortage of time, and the need to do business as part of a greater (and growing) global supply chain. Getting to 'smooth operator' status can be made easier with help from organizations like the TeleManagement Forum. In this paper, a twelve-step method is outlined to give pointers to service providers and their suppliers on how to make the journey successfully.

Rapid advancing technology and customer demand for sophisticated services are driving the global telecommunications environment into fully competitive and multi service providers environment. To cope with this new environment successfully, open network and open telecommunication management are essential. Telecommunication management is becoming more and more important to realize flexible and dynamic telecommunication services. This paper first gives a view of the new environment in the telecommunication industry and discusses the direction to be taken by service providers. Then, a concept of multi-domain management is proposed to meet a dynamically changing environment. Finally, the paper describes the subjects for the development of telecommunication management system and suggests that a competition based on harmony between the users, service providers and vendors is needed to make customers satisfied with telecommunication services.