Keywords:
Astract: The electronic exchange of business documents is an often communicated desire by enterprises and the public sector. Electronic business is currently mainly hindered by unresolved interoperability issues and a lack of tool support. Additionally, computer aided document exchange is cost intensive at the beginning and thus discourages small and medium-sized companies to adapt to new technologies. The contribution of this paper is to present suitable tool support and methods to manage the complexity of business document integration. Our modeling tool is based on UN/CEFACT's (United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business) Core Components Technical Specification allowing for platform independent, conceptual business document models. On these models further integration operations can be performed.

Keywords:
Astract: Workflow technology promises an increase in efficiency in the execution of business processes. The technology is widely accepted, but often the high costs exceed the promised benefits. Thus, it is desirable to calculate the profitability prior to investing into workflow technology. After an investment into workflow management systems (WFMS), it has to be verified whether the expected benefits have been realized or not. In this paper we present a method that covers both, the cost-benefit-ratio calculations specially customized for WFMS and the calculation of the realized savings. The profitability analysis is based on simple measurable performance indicators that consider the tangible calculation of costs as well as the quantitative and qualitative benefits. Long time practical experience in implementing and operating workflow management supported the design of the method. The method presented in this paper has been successfully used in the IT company of a banking corporation.

Keywords: Complex Event Processing, Event Stream Processing, Event-Based Systems, Event-Driven Architectures
Astract: Nowadays, business processes evolved to networked workflows that are complex and executed in parallel with little human involvement to meet the needs of today's agile and adaptive business. Contemporary business requirements yaw for agility, flexibility and service orientation. A simplified summarization of this widely discussed and necessary business trend can be reduced to the demand, that today's businesses have to adapt their processes and organizations faster than their competitors. Business organizations that are able to handle critical business events faster than their competitors will end up us winners in today's globalized and fast business.
The pillars of such business models are loosely coupled, distributed and service- or event driven-oriented systems that generate huge amounts of events at various granularity levels. The lack of tracking those events and maintaining the causal relationships and traceability between those events, as well as aggregating them to high level events or correlating them, is a problem that is currently investigated by many research groups.
Event-based systems are increasingly gaining a widespread attention for such classes of problems, that require integration with loosely coupled and distributed systems for time-critical business solutions. The field of event-based or event-processing systems is a quite young area of research and is mainly influenced by the publish-subscribe paradigm and relational database and later on by Active- and Zerolatency data warehousing. A promising solution for these problems is Complex Event Processing (CEP). The term of Complex Event Processing (CEP) was first introduced by David Luckham in his book The Power of Events and defines a set of technologies to process large amounts of events, utilizing them to monitor, steer and optimize the business in real time. A CEP system continuously processes and integrates the data included in events without any batch processes for extracting and loading data from different sources and storing it to a data warehouse for further processing or analysis. CEP solutions capture events from different sources, with different time order and take events with various relationships between eachother into account.
The contributions of this dissertation are settled in the research area of event processing systems with a special focus on CEP and Event Processing- and Query Languages. The results of this dissertation provide the research community as well as interested parties with a generic component model for event-based systems. The introduced model has been successfully evaluated through the implementation of the Event-Base. SARI-SQL is an integral part of the Event-Base and its implementation was a major challenge in terms retrieving events and their correlations in a reasonable time. The presented work set a special focus on a clean and expressive language design in order to encapsulate all the event-related entities.
Furthermore an emphasis was set on an efficient design of the query preparation and evaluation architecture that allows attaching different query optimizer strategies. With the introduced optimizer strategies the performance of queries on single-value types (which applies in 80% of the cases) is directly correlating with the underlying RDBMS performance constraints and thus creates only a small overhead. The future work on SARI-SQL includes efforts in optimizing the strategies of handling nested attribute types of events. This includes query analysis procedures and execution planning strategies in order to reduce the number of in-memory post-evaluation operations.
The presented work is part of a long-term research effort aiming at designing and developing a comprehensive event analysis toolset that allows users to query and analyze large repositories of real-time and historical events from various sources. In addition the goal is to consolidate and create a rich unified event model for event-based systems which can be supported by a wide range of event-based systems. A key focus of future research is also set on the aspect of the visualization of events with respect to their temporal occurrence, their correlation with other events, and event clusters.

Keywords: Business Process Modelling, Goals, Measures, Languages, Variabilities, UML, Profile, Metamodel
Astract: Over the last decade more and more companies started to optimize their business processes in a way to meet its business goals. They develop business process mod- els defining which activities have to be executed in which order under which con- ditions by whom and by using which resources. For this purpose a lot of different approaches to business process modelling have been developed, which resulted in many different Business Process Modelling Languages (BPMLs). The definition of a business process has to cover many different aspects (e.g. con- trol flow, organizational view, data view, etc.). A perfect business process modelling approach would address all the different aspects. Unfortunately, none of the exist- ing approaches provides concepts for addressing all of these aspects.
Each of them concentrates on some aspects. The focus on certain aspects is mainly due to the different applications areas, e.g. business engineering or software engineering etc. Although BPMLs are well established in industry and science, a comprehensive evaluation or a framework for an evaluation to compare the different BPMLs is still missing. Thus, it is the goal of this thesis to provide an evaluation framework for the comparison of BPMLs and to apply this framework in the evaluation of the currently most popular BPMLs. The resulting framework is based on a generic metamodel that captures all of the concepts appearing in any of the state-of-the-art BPMLs. On a high level this framework addresses the following views:
Business Process Context Perspective, Behavioural Perspective, Functional Perspective, In- formational Perspective, and Organisational Perspective. An evaluation based on this framework checks whether the certain aspects in each of these perspectives is supported by the concepts of each of the considered BPMLs. In the evaluation of this thesis, we used the following languages: UML 2 Activity Diagram, Business Process Modelling Notation, Event Driven Process Chain, IDEF3, Petri Net, Role Activity Diagram. According to the evaluation we were able to identify three main problems in current BPMLs. The first problem is that the definition of the dependency be- tween business processes and their supporting software systems is inadequately supported. In our approach we support the elicitation of requirements from busi- ness process models for the software systems to be developed by extending current BPMLs with software requirements and components to ensure a business-goal ori- ented software development. The second problem concerns the variability of similar, but well-distinguished software products within a software product line. These software products not only differ in its structural definition, but also in the process to create them. Today, vari- ability modelling is a domain specific modelling technique that is limited to the structural definition of similar software products. In our approach we extend the concepts of variability modeling to integrate the dynamical aspects into the UML. The resulting approach is based on a well defined dependency between UML class diagrams and UML activity diagrams. The third problem is that current conceptual BPMLs do not provide explicit mod- elling means for process goals and their measures. The modelling of goals and its monitoring is a critical step in business process modeling. Hence, we extend the metamodels of UML 2 AD, EPC and BPMN with business process goals and per- formance measures. These concepts become explicitly visible in the corresponding models. Furthermore, a mapping of the performance measures onto the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) enables their monitoring in an execution envi- ronment.

Keywords: Model Driven Software Development, Model Transformation, GMF, By-Example
Astract: Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is getting more and more attention as a viable alternative to the traditional code-centric software development paradigm.
With its progress, several model transformation approaches and languages have been developed in the past years. Most of these approaches are metamodel-based and therefore require knowledge of the abstract syntax of the modeling languages, which in contrast is not necessary for defining domain models using the concrete syntax of the respective languages.
To cope with shortcomings of current model transformation approaches we propose Model Transformation By-Example (MTBE), which is based on the by-example paradigm. Our approach allows the user to define semantic correspondences between concrete syntax elements with the help of special mapping operators. This is more user-friendly than directly specifying model transformation rules and mappings on the metamodel level. In general, the user's knowledge about the notation of the modeling language and the meaning of mapping operators is sufficient for the definition of model transformations. The definition of mapping operators is subject to extension, which has been applied for the definition of mapping operators for the structural and the behavioral modeling domain. But to keep things transparent and user-friendly, only a minimal set of mapping operators has been implemented. To compensate for the additional expressiveness inherent in common model transformation languages we apply reasoning algorithms on the models represented in concrete as well as in abstract syntax and on the metamodels to generate adequate transformation code.
In order to fulfill the requirements for a user-friendly application of MTBE, proper tool support and methods to guide the mapping and model transformation generation tasks are a must. Hence, a framework for MTBE was designed that builds on state-of-the-art MDE tools on the Eclipse platform, such as the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF), the Atlas Transformation Language (ATL), and the Atlas Model Weaver (AMW). The decision to base our implementation on top of Eclipse and further Eclipse projects was driven by the fact, that there is a huge community we can address with our MTBE plug-in.
Finally, we evaluate our approach by means of two case studies in the areas of structural as well as behavioral modeling languages.