Big Data Analytics for Predictive Maintenance in an IoT world

Big data analytics is a bigger topic today and use cases are arising in many areas of business. These range from the traditional CEP areas of financial trading to new customer engagement models such as geo-located coupons. In an Internet of Things (IoT) world, machine to machine (M2M) solutions can produce big data requirements.  These, ‘edge devices’ can post vast volumes of data into the cloud applications that service them. Manufacturing is an area, under-served by BPM and there certainly are numerous industrial M2M and big data use cases. At Bosch, we believe one of the most important and fruitful areas are predictive maintenance (PrM).

Factory floors frequently have expensive and complicated machinery that is critical to their manufacturing competitiveness. The unplanned loss of even a few Hours can result in a great financial loss. . Many companies are turning to the big data, analytics topic of predictive maintenance to optimize these resources. These methods analyze the condition of in-service equipment to project optimal maintenance measures. Analytics for this fields encompasses a broad range of mathematical disciplines, for instance vibrational analysis can use the occurrence of even a small 'out of round' sensor reading to predict the failure of a machine. When we start to aggregate a number of machines, one can apply data heuristics discover even more predictive factors. Even minor irregularities and latent failure patterns are uncovered and aligned across the resource pool.

It is not enough to have the mathematical, material science and engineering capability to create a predictive maintenance solution—— there needs digital infrastructure to support this. That infrastructure must also be capable of hosting M2M solutions. Bosch software already has an example of this in the Service Portal.

The service portal uses A combination of BPM+ and the output of predictive analytics to generate the appropriate response.

On June 6, 2013 Bosch Software will hold a webinar on their approach to PrM.

 http://www.bosch-si.com/company/news-events/events/events-16896.html .

I will be speaking along with my colleagues Karsten Koenigstein and Christina Gruen.

Process Interactions in Orchestrations and Choreography

We have common definitions for process, business rules, operational decisions, business events and other things that are important to process modeling. And, I have mentioned my favorite ones (here). But we frequently ignore one of the very important aspects of process modeling: interactions. Fingar and Smith mentions in ‘Business Process Management, the Third Wave' that an interaction is the use of process desktops that allows people or participants to interact with the process. This includes workflow emphasizing assignment, task management and form-based data entry.  So, interactions gave rise to the idea of task oriented process instances that are started by a form. We see this in today’s process monitor and task list in most BPM suites. A form is a completed interaction that spawns an instance. This was, arguably, a new concept in 2002.

The BPMN 2.0 specification (here) also delves into the concept of interactions. Section 10.1 says that a public process represents the interaction between a private business processes and another processes or participants. The interaction is the glue. In the specification, human interactions are a type of task with human involvement. Manual and human tasks have particular icons in BPMN that indicate that human involvement is required to complete the task. See the two figures below.

The Human Task &  Manual Task

Remember: a manual task is a task that is expected to be performed without the aid of any digitized business process. An example might be the nurse delivering medication to a patient. This is contrasted with a user task which is performed with the assistance of a software application or is scheduled through a task list manager. An example would be the approval of a request or deciding a proposition.

Interactions are critical to the concept of choreography. A key characteristic of choreography is that it is an activity representing an interaction between two parties rather than a unit of work. According to Dumas, "The Fundamentals of Business Process Management”, the interaction can be one-way, where a message is exchanged or two-way, where messages exchanged bring a return message. Each message has an initiator and a recipient. Indeed, the BPMN spec states that "choreographies formalize way business participants coordinate interactions. This gives rise to the 'conversation' shape center defined in the spec.

In Wikipedia the interaction is defined as ‘a kind of action that occurs as two or more objects have effects upon one another’. This is fundamental in the concept of the business process.

White Space in the Standards: Business Rules, Data and Process Modeling in BPMN

According to the Specification (here), BPMN is constrained to support only the concepts of modeling that are applicable to Business Processes. This means that other types of modeling done by organizations for business purposes is out of scope  for BPMN. Therefore, the following are out of the scope of the BPMN specification:

• Definition of organizational models and resources
• Modeling of functional breakdowns
• Data and information models
• Modeling of strategy
• Business rules models

Since these subjects are critical to Business Processes, the relationships BPMN is supposed to be evolving. We also know that operational decisions need data to decide, so at this point BPMN is incomplete with respect to creating executable business processes. An executable BPMN diagram might be more complex — it is inadequate to create an executable specification.

BPMN has a data shape, the data object. A data object is a rectangle with the upper right corner folded over, as shown here:

The text label for a data object can be found underneath the shape.  Often the current state of the data object is shown as an attribute shown in brackets under the text label.  As the diagram progresses, the state of the data object can easily be read, as displayed in the Figure below.

Figure: Use of data artifact shapes.

As with the text annotation, the association line attaches the data artifact to another shape. Data Class shapes can be associated with tasks, gateways, events, sequence lines, or message lines.  In message flow, data objects portray the “payload” or content of messages.  

The use of data objects is optional.  Some diagrams may concentrate on flow, while others show the complete details Data artifacts do not directly affect the sequence flow or message flows.  Data objects provide additional information, some of it reflected in the XML schema, without changing the basic behavior of the process.  For instance, the Data Object elements can optionally reference a DataState element, which is the state of the data contained in the Data Object. The data object can detail the metamodel’s XML particularly with a ‘callableElement’. Uses the following additional elements:

• ioSpecification,
• inputSet,  
• Data Input,

The data input and output are detailed in the purchase order approval example above. When a BPMN editor draws a Data Association to an Activity or Event it should generate this supporting invisible substructure.

As mentioned, the specifications are naive with respect to the origin mutation and alteration of data attributes. I've always maintained that this is the realm of business rules (mostly). That business rules through examination of data in order to decide Bolivian conditions controls specific aspects of operational decisions. Some of that data exploration includes analytics such as regressions, projections, and other techniques.

I believe the BPM industry needs to progress on standards with respect to business rules: the representation how they use things like Business Objects expressed in UM, and other expressions of the operational aspects of the business process. The BPMN specification pretty much admits weakness in this. So, even with the data input and output elements of BPMN, more needs to be done in order to specify a business process in a way that does not very important code aspects. The OMG spec on business rules (PRR) seems to be moving very slowly and it doesn't offer a clear connection to the process modeled by BPMN.

Introducing a new white paper: The Five Categories of Operational Decisions and their Impacts on Business Process Models

Business processes should enforce compliance to operational, legal and risk objectives. Yet how can one be assured that their processes are compliant? Increasingly, the best practices is to use a combination of business process modeling with a business rules approach- the operational decision (OD) approach. These frequently occurring, repeatable decisions are key to enforcing compliance.

A combination of BPM, OD and event processing can create comprehensive, agile solutions in many problem domains. In a new white paper from Bosch Software Innovations, we explain the role and interrelationships of these different visual modeling approaches. Most process modeling methods parse directly requirements into BPMN process elements. They incorporate with workflow patterns. There are alternate approaches that start with business rules and Bosch Software Innovations can support either. This white paper discusses how to develop processes requirements from a business rules perspective. Starting with this definition of a business process:

A business processes is an organized, coordinated flow of activities, conducted by participants, acting on and deciding with data, information, and knowledge, to achieve a business goal[1].

We can design a digitized business process based on business rules that describe the means of compliance, operational controls and risk mitigation[1]. So, from the perspective of the business process as per Ron Ross:

“A business rule is a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of the business. It is intended to assert business structure or influence the behavior of the business.”[2]

The objective is the digitized process so the rules are expressed in executable, directed graphs and decision tables. When we design processes, we are defining the behavior of the business, so that processes comply with business rules by making operational decisions—a rules-compliant process.  

Operational decisions are frequently occurring, repeatable decisions that implement the compliance, operation and risk controls. They are settled with process data and evaluated by digitized business rules. So a business rule is an atomic logic step that uses data and knowledge to evaluate a part of a proposition about a process decision³.

 In a BPM/Business Rules approach, processes are activated by business events. Chandy and Schulte[3] define a business event as:

”A business event is an event that is meaningful for conducting commercial, industrial, and governmental or trade activities.”

The differences between process, rules and business events are simple; rules are overarching, stateless directors of behavior, processes are stateful responders to the directives, and external business events, are detected and processed.

The recent research of Martijn Zoet, Richard Welke, et al found that business managers expect business rules to govern and control business operations with on five concepts:

1. Rules should influence, order or sequence a process’ tasks, decisions and internal events
2. Rules should influence and decide who is included in and assigned to a task
3. Rules should influence and decide what course of action is taken
4. Rules should influence and decide what data is retained, its validity, and duration and
5. Rules should detect, control, and respond to events

When they are dynamic or controlled in a BRMS, these five concepts are categories of operational decisions. Static elements become elements of a business process map or diagram—transitions, activities and gateways. We described five different ways that a decision’s outcome can direct the pathways of the process. As a nexus for governance, risk and regulatory compliance, the process decision is both an important management concept and a strategic design tool for achieving business objectives and goals.

Our new white paper clearly demonstrates how the 5 categories of decisions create processes that are compliant with the operational, compliance and risk management objectives. We lay out an effective design method that recognizes that process behavior considers decision-generated events. Also, from a single operational decision, events and data can trigger and control many aspects of a business processes.

The figure below depicts these 5 categories:

The Bosch Software Enterprise Platform provides a powerful design environment that simplifies management control of business processes. The result of separating processes from rules stabilizes business processes and permits operational decisions to change without having to change the process application. Understanding the five operational decision categories simplifies the choice of what should be a dynamic operational decisions supported by business rules and what should be a static part of the process. The white paper presents approaches for deciding what should be an operational decision (business rule) and what should be on the BPMN process diagram (gateways and conditions).

You can download the complete white paper here:

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[1] Martijn Zoet, Richard Welke, et al, ‘Aligning Risk Management and Compliance Considerations with Business Process Development’, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg 2009

[2]Business Rules Group, Defining Business Rules ~ What Are They Really?, www.businessrulesgroup.org

[3] K.Chandy, R. Schulte, Event Processing: Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies, McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 2009

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[1] The Microguide to Process Modeling in BPMN 2.0, Debevoise, Geneva and Welke, Advanced Component Research, 2010

Advanced Business Rules Capabilities Address Complex Challenges

At Software Innovations, we have added some interesting new customers including Green Charge Networks and Prosper Software. In addition to other projects that we cannot mention, these development shows how Visual Rules, modeling approach can solve complex challenges in our Big Data, highly dimensional, customer-focused social ecosystem.

 

The Juila set is a highly recognizable symbol for complexity as develops in the study of fractals and chaos.

From our discussions on the internet of things ( and here) and other developments, we know that today’s world of mobile-networked-social media presents new opportunities for business models and customer engagement. Example models include freemium where a service is provided free of charge, but a premium is charged for advanced features. Another style is gamificationwhere game thinking is applied to non-game applications to encourage people to adopt them. These seemingly simple, yet powerful concepts often require deep layers of implementation business logic.

This ecosystem is also being extended by sensors and edge devices in the IOT. For instance; heart monitors provide data to doctors, or fitness appliances through ordinary smart phones. Sensors on bicycles provide detailed data. These products are a visible outgrowth of the internet of things and services (IoTS); yet, to create applications one must leverage the extreme granularity of this.

In addition to the exotic, new world of the IoTS, traditional data sources have exploded in granularity and accuracy. Most of the decisions of the inputs into the operational decision include time based vectors of:

• Location, derived GIS stored locations, and proximities
• Awareness of proximal individuals and groups of individuals,
• Edge device feeds, heart rate, temperatures, video, weather

Emerging business models use applications: mobile, cloud and on-prem, to operationalize decisions. The decisions will tell customers what to do or make decisions- this is critical.  This means that companies must make effective use of this highly dimensional and time dependent data, often in nearly real-time. To achieve their objectives in this new world, these business require perception of environmental elements with respect to time and/or space or situational awareness.

The complexity arises in problems areas when ordinary, yet challenging business rules areas such as consumer retail and end-use applications, security command and control, complex financial transactions, and products with highly hierarchical catalogs, are combined with real time motions of people, vehicles or traceable financial instruments. The characteristics of this might include large, time dependent vectors of business objects. In this highly dimensional area, each data point exists in the time-location space defined by its attributes and by its relative relationship to all other time-location data points. That relationship is the domain of business rules and the pivot points for the decisions that we are describing.  In this realm, the goal of the decisioning and operational decision algorithms is to assign the data point to membership in the most appropriate cluster—even as the subject is in flight. Business Object Data Collections can be linearly separable or non-linearly separable. We have found, particularly these data are often arranged in a vector that must be efficiently traversed.

The company building applications in this complex, operational world faces the dilemma of hand codding solutions or using visual modeling paradigms. These problem often entail an huge number of logic steps with the need to make subtle changes at deep levers. At Bosch Software we believe that only the latter is sustainable.

In our experience, visual metaphors are mandatory for solutions in this ultra-complex, highly evolving world. The business analyst must be able to use their intense focus on business aspects while the technical teams provide a mastery of the technical aspects for a seamless transfer of logic changes. As a demonstration of this, visual rules, business modeling has recently solved problems in these domains:

• An athletic consumer products company seeking to operationalize decisions about fitness equipment
• A company with an innovative financial model built a multi-dimensional, dynamic pricing engine
• A financial institution created dozens of credit score cards, each with over 90 equations and 190 dimensions.

In solving these problems for many customers we have learned the following:

• Complex dimensional decisions can only be understood when they are ‘chunked’ into simple visual metaphors, otherwise business analysts get lost in code or simply give up.
• Visual paradigms including decision graphs, decision tables, state-transition diagrams and composites of these are the only way to quickly solve these challenges.
• Because they cannot traverse and filter vectors of business objects, Decision table-only approaches tightly constrain the type of problem that can be modeled and miss important dimensional aspects of these classes of problems.

In Summary, business operating in this new realm should expect change and build methods that create the proper agility.

Note: On September 27 at 2PM EST, Troy Foster, our CTO for the Americas will cover these topics in detail. You can register for this webinar here: http://www.bosch-si.com/webinar-on-advanced-business-rules.html