Authors:
Danielle Silva de Castro
1
;
Marcelo Fantinato
2
and
Mateus Barcellos Costa
1
Affiliations:
1
Postgraduate Program in Applied Computing (PPComp), Instituto Federal do Espírito Santo, Serra, Brazil
;
2
School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities, Universidade de Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Business Process Design, Conversational Agents, Automated Model Generation.
Abstract:
Interviews are widely used to collect and organize decentralized, unstructured, and undocumented information, serving as a valuable tool for business process design and re-design. Conversely, they present several challenges, including high costs related with planning, preparation, and execution, as well as the need for strong engagement from interviewees. Additionally, interviewees often lack a clear and comprehensive understanding of the processes, which complicates their ability to fully articulate them. The advent of intelligent conversational tools presents new opportunities for process elicitation but also introduces challenges in managing the subjective and tacit nature of business process knowledge, while ensuring the generation of consistent and high-quality models. Considering these issues, this paper discusses an automated approach for conducting business process modeling interviews. This approach is designed to capture process behavior using the so-called Situation-Based M
odeling Notation (SBMN), which further enables the automated generation of alternative imperative business process models. To evaluate the proposed approach, a conversational agent prototype and a model generator of possible solutions were developed. The experiments conducted demon-strate the ability to construct high-quality models according to the metrics of recall, precision, generalization, and simplicity. The results also indicate that the generated models maintain consistency with process constraints and uncover alternative models effectively.
(More)