Model‑Based User‑Interface Management for Public Services

Abstract

Public business processes can be very complex. That makes it hard for citizens to understand these processes and for software companies to implement them into software tools. Changes of the process entail expensive effort in both teaching the citizens and adapting the software. For business processes several model‑based approaches have been suggested to deal with high complexity, such as BPMN. However, modelling simplifies work of software developers rather than of citizens. We present an approach where an adequate user‑interface with user‑centric pertinent information is derived directly from the models. Our approach combines the advantages of having models for the software developers with the requirements of the users. The modelling technique we are using is Event‑driven Process Chains (EPCs). EPCs are widely accepted in the commercial area and are comprehensively investigated in the academic area as well. Due to their graphical description they are easy to understand. EPCs are implemented in the ARIS toolset, which offers the possibility to attach attributes to the elements of the EPCs. This paper will demonstrate how these attributes are used to derive a user‑interface, e.g. a relevant website or document, for each state or transition of the EPC. The tools used extract the values of the attributes and incorporate them into a web‑based user‑interface according to the EPC of the modelled business process. Execution of the model then is equivalent to running the user‑ interface. A change of the process requires a change of the model only, which is much easier to handle than changing the implementation of the user‑interface.