PPI Definition and Automated Design-Time Analysis (v 1.0) : Technical Report ISA–12–TR–02

The measurement of process performance and its analysis is crucial for the consecution of strategic and operational goals in any process-oriented organisation. These activities, like other activities carried out during a business process lifecycle, are considered time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, providing an automated support for them is very appealing from a practical point of view. In this paper, we focus on providing such automated support for the definition and analysis of Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) at design-time. To this end, we present PPINOT, a framework that relies on Description Logics (DLs) to define and analyse PPIs automatically. The advantages of PPINOT are three. First, it allows the definition of commonly used PPIs that, to the best of our knowledge, cannot be defined with other similar proposals, specially those related to data. Second, it enables a seamless relationship between PPIs and business process models, which makes the use of PPIs along the business process lifecycle easier. Third, it specifies and implements three mostly novel analysis operations families that can assist business process analysts during PPIs definition and business process evolution. Furthermore, since PPINOT relies on Description Logics (DLs), new analysis operations can be defined to extend those described in this paper, being the reasoning power of DLs the only limit