Abstract

Informed decision making and flexibility have grown to be important standard requirements in the field of business process modeling and design due to the emergence of intrinsically complex variables within the business environment. Traditionally, researches on business process modeling and informed decision making have focused on the configurability of business process models. Our review of literature made us realize that researchers in this field have considerably neglected the main drivers of flexibility and decision-making which have an extensive impact on business process flow. Such drivers form, in our opinion, cross cutting concerns that need to be extracted from within the context of the business process. Context can include, but is not limited to, work force availability, work force experience, system failures, weather conditions, environmental hazards, and financial constraints. In this research we present a new general purpose methodology for aspectized modeling of the context of business processes within the different business domains and also for modeling business processes as goal-oriented finite state machines. Being dependent on context-awareness and goal-orientation, our method deduces recommendations for improving the business process flow. We envisioned how context may be conceptualized, how contextual elements may be distributed across business operational levels according to the goals of the business process, and how business process flow recommendations based on the aspectized contextual facts may materialize. We managed to make our vision concrete by implementing all this into a prototypical framework that made the methodology both usable and testable. We tested our framework within the Airlines and Telecom business domains. The experimental results showed significant improvement in the financial costs and execution time. The results proved the importance of integrating context-awareness, context-modeling and goal-orientation in the field of business process modeling as well as configuration and decision making. By adopting context-awareness based on modern technology we believe that this research is a contribution in the field of intelligent business environments and that it opens the door for more challenging extensions on more complex goal-oriented business processes.

Department

Computer Science & Engineering Department

Degree Name

MS in Computer Science

Graduation Date

6-1-2012

Submission Date

June 2012

First Advisor

Hosny, Hoda

Second Advisor

Aly, Sherif

Extent

NA

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Library of Congress Subject Heading 1

Context-aware computing.

Library of Congress Subject Heading 2

Business -- Data processing.

Rights

The author retains all rights with regard to copyright. The author certifies that written permission from the owner(s) of third-party copyrighted matter included in the thesis, dissertation, paper, or record of study has been obtained. The author further certifies that IRB approval has been obtained for this thesis, or that IRB approval is not necessary for this thesis. Insofar as this thesis, dissertation, paper, or record of study is an educational record as defined in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) (20 USC 1232g), the author has granted consent to disclosure of it to anyone who requests a copy.

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Approval

Not necessary for this item

Comments

I would like to thank all the people who helped me in order to bring this research to light with their advice, guidance, contribution, technical and business consultation, support or criticism. There were many people who were involved in this research work. From AUC, my advisors: Dr. Hoda Hosny and Dr. Sherif Gamal Aly, who made a major and significant contribution to this work. Their guidance, ideas and suggestions have been invaluable throughout this challenging research journey. They supplied me with unlimited support and were very generous with their time and devotion to this project. The interl reviewers Dr. Sherif El-Kassas and Dr. Awad Khalil, provided valuable criticism in the proposal and in validating the research idea. From the University of Copenhagen, Denmark: Dr. Jackob Bardram and Mr. Stanzo Karolly who helped in understanding the Java Context-awareness Framework developed by Dr.Bardram and extending it. From the University of Queensland, Australia: Dr.Michael Rosemann and Mr. Karsten Ploesser who shared with me their thoughts and contemporary research work in conceptualizing business process context. I would like to thank my friend and my mager Sylva Mounir for her cooperation and consideration of my work commitments during the write-up period of this thesis and also for her continuous support and consultation on how to evaluate the success of business decisions and business strategies. I would like to thank all my family members: my mother, Es Azmy, my father, Armia Keriakos Sawers , my grandmother, dia Nessim and my late grandfather, Azmy Mancy. They provided me with invaluable and unlimited moral support without which this fil moment would not have been possible.

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