Dissertação de Thanner Soares Silva

Aluno: Thanner Soares Silva
Orientadora: Profª. Drª. Lucinéia Heloisa Thom

Título: An architecture for enabling business process-oriented text generation
Linha de Pesquisa: Modelagem de dados e processos de negócios

Data: 19/02/2019
Hora: 10h30.
Local: AUD-0 (Auditório Zero) do prédio 43412 do Instituto de Informática da UFRGS

Banca Examinadora:
Prof. Dr. Cirano Iochpe (UFRGS)
Prof. Dr. Bruno Castro da Silva (UFRGS)
Profª. Drª. Sarajane Marques Peres (USP –  por videoconferência)

Presidente da Banca: Profª. Drª. Lucinéia Heloisa Thom

Abstract: Business process management has become an increasingly present activity in organizations. In this context, business process descriptions are considered as a useful artifact in both identifying business processes and complementing business process documentation. However, organizations do not always create business process descriptions to document their business processes. In addition, business process descriptions may not follow a specific format, which may lead to contain ambiguous or non-recurring sentences that make it difficult to understand the process. Thus, this dissertation aims to develop an approach that enables the generation of business process-oriented texts. In the context of this work, the business process-oriented text is defined as a text that is structured, able to maintain the maximum information related to the business process, and able to check the quality of the process in relation to the BPMN 2.0 and in relation to soundness. In order to achieve this goal, was performed an analysis in the literature and in 64 business process descriptions in order to define how business process-oriented texts should be. In addition, an SOA-based architecture was developed in which the steps required to generate the business process-oriented text are addressed to the individual services. The analysis made it possible to find 101 recurring sentence templates in business processes descriptions, of which 13 were considered to have ambiguity issues based on the adopted criteria. Furthermore, a prototype was developed and the process description produced by the approach was compared to the original process model through a process similarity technique. The findings made in order to define how the business process-oriented texts should be can support other approaches in generating business process descriptions more suitable for process analysts and domain experts. Finally, the architecture can be enhanced with other services capable of providing other functionalities that contribute to the creation and management of business processes descriptions in organizations.

Keywords: Business process management. business process model and notation. Natural language processing. service oriented architecture.