JarCastingPPINOT
A key aspect in any process-oriented organisation is the measurement of process performance for the achievement of its strategic and operational goals. Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) are a key asset to carry out this evaluation, and, therefore, the management of these PPIs throughout the whole BP lifecycle is crucial.
PPINOT is a set of libraries aimed at facilitating and automating the PPI management. The support includes their definition using either a graphical or a template-based textual notation, their automated analysis at design-time, and their automated computation based on processing an event log obtained from a process simulator or a Business Process Management System.
PPINOT has been integrated into PRspectives, which is a multi-perspective business process modeler.
Components
In its current version, PPINOT is composed of four components: ppinot-model, ppinot-ontology, ppinot-oryx and ppinot-templates-angular. The other two components (ppinot-xml-owl and ppinot-templates) are obsolete and need to be updated to the current version of ppinot-model. Next, we detail each of them.
ppinot-model
This library provides a Java implementation of the PPINOT metamodel, which is detailed in http://www.isa.us.es/ppinot. This metamodel provides a foundation on which an automated support for these activities can be built. It identifies the concepts that are necessary for defining Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) such as the different types of measures that can be used to compute the PPI value. It was defined to address the challenge of providing PPI definitions that are unambiguous and complete, traceable to the business process elements used in their definition, independent of the language used to model business processes (BP) and amenable to automated analysis.
A PPINOT model can be serialized in two different formats:
- As an XML document that can be embedded into a standard BPMN 2.0 XML file. This library provides the serialization and deserialization mechanisms as well as the XML Schema of the PPINOT model.
- As a JSON file that can be used while implementing REST APIs.
ppinot-modelrelies on Jackson to serialize and deserialize from JSON to Java classes.
Finally, ppinot-model also include the computation of the PPIs based on an event log. The current implementation supports logs in MXML format. However, support to other formats can be easily integrated.
ppinot-ontology
PPINOT ontology is an OWL ontology based on the PPINOT metamodel. It has been developed to enable design-time analysis of PPIs defined with PPINOT using off-the-shelf OWL Reasoners. It also includes an use case showing how it can be used.
ppinot-oryx
This library is an implementation of Visual PPINOT, which is a graphical notation intended to be used together with BPMN diagrams. Visual PPINOT has been implemented as an Oryx stencil set that extends the Oryx-native BPMN stencil set with the symbols of Visual PPINOT. A complete description of these symbols can be found at http://www.isa.us.es/ppinot.
The library includes:
- The stencil set, which include the symbols used in Visual PPINOT in SVG format and a description of the properties and the connection rules.
- Java code to convert from the PPINOT model to an Oryx diagram and from an Oryx diagram to PPINOT XML.
ppinot-templates-angular
This library is an AngularJS module that implements a template-based textual notation for PPIs defined with PPINOT. The tool guides the user by providing linguistic patterns according to the selection performed in the different fields. PPIs are read and edited according to the PPINOT JSON format.
Installation
PPINOT libraries are available in Maven central repository. Specifically, you must add the following text to the pom.xml of your project:
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>es.us.isa.ppinot</groupId>
<artifactId>ppinot-model</artifactId>
<version>2.2</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>es.us.isa.ppinot</groupId>
<artifactId>ppinot-oryx</artifactId>
<version>2.2</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>es.us.isa.ppinot</groupId>
<artifactId>ppinot-templates-angular</artifactId>
<version>2.2</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
Acknowledgements
This project has been developed as part of Research Projects ISABEL, SETI, THEOS, TAPAS, COPAS and BELI.
