Abstract
Business Process Automation (BPA) refers to the automation of business processes through technology, with the goal of improving efficiency, reducing errors, and increasing productivity by eliminating manual and repetitive tasks. Over the past few years, the number of BPA platforms has increased, including both open-source and proprietary solutions. However, some challenges and limitations still exist related to the adoption of these solutions, such as vendor lock-in, limited UI/UX, limited integration, outdated technology stack, and lack of support for non-process features. To address these issues, this paper presents the AKIP platform, an open-source framework for developing process-aware information systems (PAISs) using code generation techniques. AKIP generates functional process-aware web applications from BPMN business process models, making it the only known software tool capable of generating fully functional process-aware web applications. To evaluate the effectiveness of the AKIP platform, a case study was conducted in the industry and six business processes automated into a process-oriented web application were analyzed in this paper. The study showed that the AKIP platform was able to generate a functional web application while supporting the automation of business processes with different model sizes and complexities. Furthermore, this study showed that even a team of professionals with little experience was able to produce such results by using the AKIP platform.
The authors thank the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Centre for Community Mapping (COMAP).
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Notes
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Acronym for Create, Read, Update, and Delete.
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Including Subprocess’ internal tasks.
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Their internal elements are not computed because Call Activities denote reusable (sub)processes that are specified in independent models.
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For now, only Camunda Modeler is supported.
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BPMN’s Script tasks behave exactly like Service tasks in an automated BPMN model with the AKIP platform. The differences between these task types are the visual representation and the semantics for the model.
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Telemaco Neto, U., Oliveira, T., Pillat, R., Alencar, P., Cowan, D., Melo, G. (2023). Scaffolding Process-Aware Information Systems with the AKIP Platform. In: Marchiori, M., Domínguez Mayo, F.J., Filipe, J. (eds) Web Information Systems and Technologies. WEBIST 2022. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 494. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43088-6_4
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