El autor Irene Barba ha publicado 8 artículo(s):

Autores: Irene Barba / Andreas Lanz  / Andrés Jiménez Ramírez  / Barbara Weber / Manfred Reichert / Carmelo Del Valle  / 
Palabras Clave:

Business processes which require a high flexibility are com- monly specified in a declarative (e.g., constraint-based) way. In general, offering operational support (e.g., generating possible execution traces) to declarative business process models entails more complexity when compared to imperative modeling alternatives. Such support becomes even more complex in many real scenarios where the management of complex temporal relations between the process activities is crucial (i.e., the temporal perspective should be managed). Despite the needs for enabling process flexibility and dealing with temporal constraints, most existing tools are unable to manage both. In a previous work, we then proposed TConDec-R, which is a constraint-based process modeling lan- guage which allows for the specification of temporal constraints. In this paper we introduce the basis and a prototype of a constraint-based tool with a client/server architecture for providing operational support to TConDec-R process models.

Autores: Andrés Jiménez-Ramírez / Irene Barba / Carmelo del Valle / 
Palabras Clave: business process modeling support - Constraint programming - constraint satisfaction problems - process flexibility

Abstract. For more than a decade, the interest in aligning information
systems in a process-oriented way has been increasing. To enable operational support for business processes, the latter are usually specified in
an imperative way. The resulting process models, however, tend to be too
rigid to meet the flexibility demands of the actors involved. Declarative
process modeling languages, in turn, provide a promising alternative in
scenarios in which a high level of flexibility is demanded. In the scientific
literature, declarative languages have been used for modeling rather simple processes or synthetic examples. However, to the best of our knowledge, they have not been used to model complex, real-world scenarios
that comprise constraints going beyond control-flow. In this paper, we
propose the use of a declarative language for modeling a sophisticated
healthcare process scenario from the real world. The scenario is subject to
complex temporal constraints and entails the need for coordinating the
constraint-based interactions among the processes related to a patient
treatment process. As demonstrated in this work, the selected real process scenario can be suitably modeled through a declarative approach.

This work has been published in the proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE’18). GGS Class 2. DOI:doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91563-0_23

Autores: Andrés Jiménez Ramírez / Irene Barba / Manfred Reichert / Barbara Weber / Carmelo Del Valle / 
Palabras Clave: Declarative process model - Healthcare process - process flexibility - Temporal constraints

Abstract. Process-aware information systems (PAISs) are increasingly
used to provide
flexible support for business processes. The support given
through a PAIS is greatly enhanced when it is able to provide accurate
time predictions which is typically a very challenging task. Predictions
should be (1) multi-dimensional and (2) not based on a single process in-
stance. Furthermore, the prediction system should be able to (3) adapt to
changing circumstances, and (4) deal with multi-perspective declarative
languages (e.g., models which consider time, resource, data and control
flow perspectives). In this work, a novel approach for generating time
predictions considering the aforementioned characteristics is proposed.
For this, rst, a multi-perspective constraint-based language is used to
model the scenario. Thereafter, an optimized enactment plan (represent-
ing a potential execution alternative) is generated from such a model
considering the current execution state of the process instances. Finally,
predictions are performed by evaluating a desired function over this en-
actment plan. To evaluate the applicability of our approach in practical
settings we apply it to a real process scenario. Despite the high com-
plexity of the considered problems, results indicate that our approach
produces a satisfactory number of good predictions in a reasonable time.

This research has been supported by the Spanish MINECO R&D Projects Pololas TIN2016-76956-C3-2-R and PLAN MINER TIN2015-71618-R.

Autores: Andrés Jiménez Ramírez / Irene Barba / Juan Fernández-Olivares / Carmelo Del Valle / Barbara Weber / 
Palabras Clave: Constraint programming - Constraint-based process models - Decision Support Systems - Flexible process-aware information systems - Planning and scheduling - Time prediction

La generación de predicciones sobre instancias de procesos de negocio permite anticipar problemas, evitar el incumplimiento de restricciones de una manera proactiva, y tomar decisiones sobre prioridades y restricciones al enfrentarse a eventos inesperados, e.g., retrasos. Sin embargo, elaborar una predicción es una tarea compleja en la mayoría de los casos ya que se deben tener en cuenta múltiples instancias y recursos, es necesario adaptar dichas predicciones a circunstancias cambiantes, y hay que tener en cuenta distintas dimensiones, no sólo el tiempo. En este contexto, el presente trabajo propone una propuesta novedosa para generar predicciones sobre un conjunto de instancias en ejecución relacionadas con un modelo declarativo de un proceso de negocio. Dicha propuesta consiste en generar un plan de ejecución optimizado a partir del modelo declarativo y del estado de las instancias en ejecución. Tras ello, la predicción se genera evaluando la función que se desea predecir sobre el plan de ejecución generado. La presente propuesta ha sido evaluada utilizando un modelo de proceso de un escenario real que incluye restricciones temporales, de datos, de recursos y de control-flow que lo dotan de una alta complejidad. Los prometedores resultados obtenidos alientan a continuar los trabajos en escenarios con características diferentes que permitan extender la validez de la propuesta.

Autores: Andrés Jiménez-Ramírez / Irene Barba / Juan Fernández-Olivares / Carmelo del Valle / Barbara Weber / 
Palabras Clave: Constraint programming - Constraint-based process models - Flexible process-aware information systems - Planning and scheduling - Time prediction

The robotic automation of processes is of much interest to organizations. A common use case is to automate the repetitive manual tasks (or processes) that are currently done by back-office staff through some information system (IS). The lifecycle of any Robotic Process Automation (RPA) project starts with the analysis of the process to automate. This is a very time-consuming phase, which in practical settings often relies on the study of process documentation. Such documentation is typically incomplete or inaccurate. To deploy robots in a production environment that are designed on such a shaky basis entails a high risk. This paper describes and evaluates a new proposal for the early stages of an RPA project: the analysis of a process and its subsequent design. The idea is to leverage the knowledge of back-office staff, which starts by monitoring them in a non-invasive manner. This is done through a screen-mouse-key-logger, i.e., a sequence of images, mouse actions, and key actions are stored along with their timestamps. The log which is obtained in this way is transformed into a UI log through image-analysis techniques (e.g., fingerprinting or OCR) and then transformed into a process model by the use of process discovery algorithms. We evaluated this method for two real-life, industrial cases. The evaluation shows clear and substantial benefits in terms of accuracy and speed. This paper presents the method, along with a number of limitations that need to be addressed such that it can be applied in wider contexts.

Autores: Andrés Jiménez Ramírez / Hajo A. Reijers / Irene Barba / Carmelo Del Valle / 
Palabras Clave: business process outsourcing - process discovery - Robotic Process Automation

Autores: Irene Barba / Andrés Jiménez Ramírez / Manfred Reichert / Carmelo Del Valle / Barbara Weber / 
Palabras Clave: Declarative process - Healthcare process - process flexibility - Rolling planning horizon