There is an abundance of business process modeling techniques that capture and address different aspects of a business process. A limited number of these process models allow further quantitative analysis, and only a few enable structured process improvement. This paper reviews and classifies the main techniques for business process modeling with regard to their analysis and optimization capabilities. Three primary groups are identified, and a selection of representative business process modeling techniques is classified based on these. Similar classification is also presented for the analysis and optimization approaches for business processes that were identified in relevant literature. The main contribution of the paper is that it identifies which types of business process models are suitable for analysis and optimization, and also highlights the lack of such approaches. This paper offers a state-of-the-art review in the areas of business process modeling, analysis, and optimization-underlining that the latter two have not received enough coverage and support in the literature.

The agribusiness sector shows tremendous growth and sustainability prospects by exploiting the challenges of “AgriFood-Tech” business models in the digital environment, by encouraging innovation, accelerating institutional and structural change, enhancing productivity, and introducing new products and services to the market. The purpose of this study is to investigate different types of “AgriFood-Tech” digital models and analyze their role in the agribusiness and AgriFood sector. Based on relevant literature research, the authors present and discuss five indicative examples of “AgriFood-Tech” models, using the Business Model Canvas (BMC) framework. The methodology included the analysis of the components of innovative AgriFood innovative business models paradigms, such as distribution channels, key partnerships, customer selection and relationships, financial viability, and value proposition. The goal was to explore their building blocks and the required decisions that create, deliver, and capture value. Our findings highlight the importance of specific features of the models, including online sharing of information between the stakeholders, online searches of agri-products, and logistics services in the agribusiness sector.

This Doctoral Consortium paper discusses how NLP can be applied in the domain of BPM in order to automatically generate business process models from existing documentation within the organization. The main idea is that from the syntactic and grammatical structure of a sentence, the components of a business process model can be derived (i.e. activities, resources, tasks, patterns). The result would be a business process model depicted using BPMN - a dedicated business process modeling technique

Fighting crime in cyberspace requires law enforcement authorities to immerse in a digital ocean of vast amount of information and also to acquire and objectify the evidence of criminal activity. Handling digital evidence is a complex and multifaceted process as they can provide critical evidentiary information in an unquestionable and irrefutable way. When digital evidence resides in a cloud storage environment the criminal investigation is faced with unprecedented contemporary legal challenges. In this paper, the authors identify three main legal challenges that arise from the current cloud-based technological landscape, i.e., territoriality (the loss of location), possession (the cloud content ownership) and confiscation procedure (user authentication/data preservation issues). On the onset of the identified challenges, the existing American, European and International legal frameworks are thoroughly evaluated. Finally, the authors discuss and endorse the Power of Disposal, a newly formed legal notion and a multidisciplinary solution with a global effect as a result of collaboration between technical, organizational and legal perspectives as an effective first step to mitigate the identified legal challenges.

Business process redesign (BPR) is an organizational initiative for achieving competitive multi-faceted advantages regarding business processes, in terms of cycle time, quality, cost, customer satisfaction and other critical performance metrics. In spite of the fact that BPR tools and methodologies are increasingly being adopted, process innovation efforts have proven ineffective in delivering the expected outcome. This paper investigates the eligibility of BPMN process models towards the application of redesign methods inspired by data-flow communities. In previous work, the transformation of a business process model to a directed acyclic graph (DAG) has yielded notable optimization results for determining average performance of process executions consisting of ad-hoc processes. Still, the utilization encountered drawbacks due to a lack of input specification, complexity assessment and normalization of the BPMN model and application to more generic business process cases. This paper presents an assessment mechanism that measures the eligibility of a BPMN model and its capability to be effectively transformed to a DAG and be further subjected to data-centric workflow optimization methods. The proposed mechanism evaluates the model type, complexity metrics, normalization and optimization capability of candidate process models, while at the same time allowing users to set their desired complexity thresholds. An indicative example is used to demonstrate the assessment phases and to illustrate the usability of the proposed mechanism towards the advancement and facilitation of the optimization phase. Finally, the authors review BPMN models from both an SOA-based business process design (BPD) repository and relevant literature and assess their eligibility.