Modeling and Analyzing Process Architecture for Context-Driven Adaptation: Designing Cognitively-Enhanced Business Processes for Enterprises

Organizations are increasingly looking to adopt and incorporate cognitive capabilities into key business processes to aid human decision-making activities. The availability of context data helps with improved decision-making involving both human users and cognitive systems, while ensuring continuing satisfaction of enterprise objectives. Therefore, the ongoing monitoring, selection and management of context data for redesigning sections of the overall business process structure, particularly where the cognitive systems are integrated in business processes, is of great interest. This paper proposes a systematic model-based approach to visualize the detection of context changes in a business process, determine an appropriate response to this context change, and identify the corresponding reconfiguration of processes in another part of the enterprise. This paper not only handles context, but also looks at the processes that need to respond to changes in that context. Together these processes constitute a business process architecture. This enables business process reconfiguration to better integrate cognitive systems in process activities requiring decision-making. The use of such modeling techniques facilitates the investigation of multiple process configurations while considering satisfaction of functional and non-functional objectives and ongoing contextual changes.