Data-Driven Performance Analysis Of Scheduled Processes - Essay Review.

Title Page: The title of the assignment, the name of the paper you are reviewing and its authors, and your name and student ID.

• Introduction: A statement of the purpose for your essay and a brief outline of how you will discuss the selected article (one or two paragraphs). Make sure to identify the article being reviewed.
• Body: Describe the intention and content of the article. If it is a research report, discuss the research method (survey, case study, observation, experiment, or other method) and findings. Comment on problems or issues highlighted by the authors. Discuss the conclusions of the article and how they are relevant to Business Process Management. Comparing ideas in the article you are reviewing to other articles discussing related topics will add significant strength to your paper. Note that it is expected that there will be many citations referring to the paper you are reviewing.
• Conclusion: A summary of the points you have made in the body of the paper. These should match your stated purpose. The conclusion should not introduce any ‘new’ material that was not discussed in the body of the paper. (One or two paragraphs)

Paper has an identified purpose (5 marks)

1. i) Identifies the paper under review (1)
2. ii) States the purpose of the student essay (2)

iii) Is refined and clearly stated (1)

1. iv) Provides an overview of the papers being discussed (1)

Body of paper has appropriate content (15 marks)

1. i) Contains appropriate material (2)
2. ii) Presents a well-structured discussion (2)

iii) Uses material from other authors (3)

1. iv) Summarises and discusses the content of the article(s) (4)
2. v) Identifies and discusses the article’s conclusions (4)

References & Grammar (5 marks)

1. i) Citations are indicated correctly (Harvard) (2)
2. ii) Grammatical expression is satisfactory (3)

This essay is performed on the “13tth International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM)”.  The essay reviews the article: “Data-Driven Performance Analysis of Scheduled Processes” which is based on Business Process Management. The major purpose of the essay is to understand facts and findings on Business Process Management and its use in the contemporary business. In order to support the review, three peer-reviewed journal article have been selected that have been performed on Business Process Management. In order to review the journal article, essay paid head to all sections of the article starting from the review of the introductory part, followed by literature review and methodology. When reviewing the paper, the essay first introduces how the topic in the paper has been introduced and what goals and objectives have been prepared. Likewise, the essay also focuses on the research techniques that have been used by the author of the article. When discussing the methods, the essay also identifies the reliability and validity of the methods by assessing the methods used in other similar articles. The major part of the review is presented on the basis of the comparison between the conclusions drawn by the authors and conclusions drawn by other articles on the selected context. Moreover, the methods used in the article have been compared to the methods used in supporting articles performed on Business Process Management.

Analysis

The major intent of the article is to focus on the issue related to the performance of schedule business processes which is a fundamental significance of service as well as the manufacturing technique. This happened as the existing method for performance analysis is not able to deal with both queuing semantics as well as the process perspective. Therefore, the paper particularly aims to resolve this gap by enhancing a significant method for implementing rich process logs to particularly analyse the performance of scheduled process. The issue highlighted in this paper is a crucial, as the study performed by Giacosa,  Mazzoleni and Usai (2018) also states that the business process management is always a critical factor as most of the small and medium size firms tend to adopt process organizations but hardly a business pay head to the process by which organizations can remain distinctive. On the other side, a study performed by Malinova and Mendling (2018) reveals the fact that actionable guidelines are missing from several reference that particularly works on the Business Process Management. The authors claims that the success factors are not properly contextualized in several sections or in the element of the business process management.

Discovery of Queue-Enabling CSPN Models

So, in order to develop a unique and core method for implementing the rich process logs to assess the performance of the scheduled process, the study uses the method that clubs simulation, queuing analytics as well as the statistical techniques. The fundamental approach of the method is the discovery of an individual case model from data on the basis an extension of Coloured Petri Nets Formalism. It is worth mentioning that the resulting model discussed in the study can help to stimulate to respond to the performance queries (Miglietta et al. 2018). When particularly applying the methods, the authors have discussed practical approach in which they referred a use-case that is supported by the data from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The scholars particularly focus on the fact of schedule of an ambulatory patient which typically includes a blood draw – an experimentation by a physician or the nurse and practitioner as well as a chemotherapy infusion. In the study, the authors have talked about a set of models that such a schedule log which particularly serves as the data model as well as Coloured Petri Nets which is a modelling formalism based on a Coloured Petri Nets with stochastic delays as well as scheduling transitions. On the contrary, the schedule log includes a series of tasks and the particular execution of time of performing the tasks. According to  Giacosa, Mazzoleni and Usai (2018) the significance of developing targets at the time of modelling techniques should be emphasized, particularly during the identification of techniques that could undergo the phase of BPM lifecycle. In addition, the authors of this article had also mentioned that having developed goals could help to enable the organizations or the businesses to measure the performance of the process after it has gone through the redesign.

Another significant section found in the article is discovery of queue-enabling CSPN models. This particular section of the article is devoted to the discovery as well as enrichment of Queue-Enabling Colored Stochastic Petri Nets which is derived from the scheduled log. When implementing this approach, the author have provided an overview of pre-processing as well as the assumptions necessary for finding out and enriching the QCSPN model and thereafter the stud demonstrate a three-step discovery algorithm that usually constructs QCSPN. According to Malinova and Mendling (2018), precedence constraints are the key feature of scheduled process which helps to make sure that cases are not authorized to continue to a new task before the subset of other related activities are performed.

Folding and Projection of QSCPN into Queuing Network

Particularly, in order to deal with the parallelism, the authors of the study have applied the method of pre-processing phase under which they have depicted parallel task activities with the help interval calculus. Thus, the study assume the activities to be parallel if the intersection of their planned time is not empty. However, Miglietta et al. (2018) mentioned that the study needs to assume the existence of parallelism set II, which further contains a series of activities or tasks that are planned to be performed in parallel. Moreover, this particular discovery process helps to derive three more assumption such as work conserving, temporal deviation and duration dependencies. As put forward by Malinova and Mendling (2018), the resources could be available immediately after finishing a particular activity, while the temporal deviation could be of the schedule in which the activities could deviate in a time period with the inclusion of resource, activities as well as routing deviation.

Apart from the above presented section, the article also presented a set of facts related to Folding and Projection of QSCPN particularly into Queuing network. This section of the paper helps to observe the fact that authors have emphasized on the folding and projection of QCSPN. However, Giacosa,  Mazzoleni and Usai (2018) commented that the authors have only discussed the state of the function but the definition lack required details about the function should be implemented. According to the authors of the selected article, a folding function only creates a new QCSPN model under a set of assumption. For example, removed parallelism in folding 1 is particularly known for its negative impact on the analytical tractability of queuing network. This could particularly motivates people to consider a folding operation which converts N₀ into a concurrency-free model. This particular function helps to enable all parallel task to be initiated as well as ended at the same time covering all necessary resources that were later scheduled to carry out the parallel activities.

As put forward by Malinova and Mendling (2018), the institution behind the perspective of QCSPN into Queuing Network remains straight forward; moreover queuing network must include a directed graph, with vertices being single-station queue as well as edge. Nonetheless, the article did not mention about the fact that a first step of projection queuing stations of generating QCSPN are converted into vertices which belong to target Queuing Network. According to Miglietta et al. (2018), due to this stated reason every vertex of the Queuing network could be characterized by a stimulated number of resources that exist in that particular vertices.

Evaluation

The evaluation section of the article has discussed the outcome of an empirical evaluation of the proposed approach. Hence, the authors of the articles have mentioned about and demonstrated the relevancy of the method spectrum on the basis of Petri Net-based simulators with the help of version of the originating model. The scholars particularly focus on the fundamental aspects that further include the execution of their used techniques. The study also discussed the dataset and a complete design of their experiment. When it comes to the implementation, the article has implemented the model construction, its enrichment with the past data findings, the stimulation semantics and the folding operation along with a projection into the Queuing Theory on the basis of the snapshot predictor. The implementation has been done with the help of python programming language which helps to build an open-sources SNAKES model.  It has been identified that the implementation is available and it remains as the free-open source project.  Another significant part of the conclusion drawn in the article is the data description; this means that the data that authors consider usually come from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The study has combined two different dataset into a single one which includes schedule visits as well as their corresponding execution times. Hence, the later one contains a detailed schedule for each day while the other one is particularly based on Real Time Location System.

In addition to this, the empirical evaluation also demonstrates that efficient queuing predictor could remain more accurate when it is particularly compared to stimulation model. According to the findings, the major drawback of the projected model is that it might not be applicable to the queries of performance question. For instance, the prediction of individual resources utilization, without the using the shared resources as well as parallelism prediction. It is also found that Classical Queuing Networks are not particularly expressive enough to make analysis of such questions without stimulating. In addition, Giacosa,  Mazzoleni and Usai (2018) commend that folding parallelism as well as the shared resources did not have impact on the model of stimulation and this should be explained by the fact that the dataset presented in the article includes some parallel tasks. These tasks are required to be implanted by a single resources. When reviewing the articles, Malinova and Mendling (2018) also mentioned that the major error that is found in the finding is the additional insight. According to this author as the queuing predictor develops upon the Rescheduled folding, it could avoid scheduling delays and carries major negative error in the eventual result.

Despite the criticism of the authors, a significant factor, which is worth mentioning is that deviation in the order of tasks are not rate and such nature could explain then inaccuracy of the stimulation of the models as they consider that the sequence of takes are not destroyed. Nonetheless, the queuing predictor might consider a series of activities or task despite their executional order, which further describes their accuracy. However, it is worth mentioning that the findings of the selected paper lack an enhanced integrated framework for the Business Process Management with some experimental guidance related to each of its elements.

Conclusion

This essay reviews the issues of data-driven performance analysis for some scheduled process. In order to finalize this, the authors have developed a technique that involves or amalgamates the techniques from Queuing Theory with a Coloured Petri Nets. Particularly, for the purpose of effectiveness of computation, the study has defined a state of folding operation that give the permission to project creation of QCSPN model into the Queuing network. The approach in the article was carried out and evaluated with the help of experimental and practical data from outpatient cancer institutions demonstrating the influence of model abstraction on transparency with respect to root-mean squared error. The essay particularly focuses on the issue that existing technique for performance analysis is not able to consider queuing semantic and the technique of different perspective. The essay reviews how this gap has been covered in the paper with variety of methods.

Reference

Giacosa, E., Mazzoleni, A. and Usai, A., 2018. Business Process Management (BPM) How complementary BPM capabilities can build an ambidextrous state in business process activities of family firms. Business Process Management Journal. 3 September 2018, 24(5):1145-1162

Malinova, M. and Mendling, J., 2018. Identifying do’s and don’ts using the integrated business process management framework. Business Process Management Journal. 2 July 2018, 24(4):882-899

Miglietta, N., Battisti, E., Carayannis, E. and Salvi, A., 2018. Capital structure and business process management: evidence from ambidextrous organizations. Business Process Management Journal. Vol. 24 Issue: 5, pp.1255-1270, https://doi-org.wallaby.vu.edu.au:4433/10.1108/BPMJ-07-2017-0214

Senderovich, A., Rogge-Solti, A., Gal, A., Mendling, J., Mandelbaum, A., Kadish, S. and Bunnell, C.A., 2015, August. Data-driven performance analysis of scheduled processes. In International Conference on Business Process Management (pp. 35-52). Springer, Cham.