The International Arab Journal of Information Technology (IAJIT)

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Using MCDM and FaaS in Automating the Eligibility of Business Rules in the Decision-Making

Serverless Computing, also named Function as a Service (FaaS) in the Azure cloud provider, is a new feature of cloud computing. This is another brick, after managed and fully managed services, allowing to provide on-demand services instead of provisioned resources and it is used to strengthen the company’s ability in order to master its IT system and consequently to make its business processes more profitable. Knowing that decision making is one of the important tasks in business processes, the improvement of this task was the concern of both the industry and the academy communities. Those efforts have led to several models, mainly the two Object Management Group (OMG) models: Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and Decision Model and Notation (DMN) in order to support this need. The DMN covers the decision-making task in business processes mainly the eligibility of business rules. This eligibility can be automated in order to help designers in the mastering of this important task by the running of an algorithm or a method such as the Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). This feature can be designed and implemented and deployed in various architectures to integrate it in existing Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). It could then improve supporting several business areas such as the Business Intelligence (BI) process. In this paper, our main contribution is the enrichment of the DMN model by the automation of the business rules eligibility through Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) using FaaS to further streamline the decision- making task in business processes. Results show to strengthen business-IT alignment and reduce the gap between the real world and associated IT solutions.


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[19] Zardari N., Ahmed K., Shirazi S., and Yusop Z., Weighting Methods and their Effects on Multi- Criteria Decision-Making Model Outcomes in Water Resources Management, Springer, 2015. Riadh Ghlala he is an associate university teacher in computer science in the network of Higher Institutes of Technological Studies (ISET) since September 1998 and he is currently a professor technologist (since September 2019) at the Higher Institute of Technological Studies of Radès (Tunisia). Since 2015, he has been conducting research on improving Decision-Making in Business Processes applied to Business Intelligence (BI) projects. He is also a member of the scientific council of the Strategies for Modeling and Artificial Intelligence (SMART) research laboratory at ISG Tunis. In addition to his academic activities, he is also a certified trainer and consultant in Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon Web Service technologies. Zahra Kodia she received the B.Sc. degree in Business Computing from the Institut Supérieur de Gestion, University of Tunis (ISG-Tunis), Tunisia, in 2006. the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Ecole Nationale des Sciences de l’Informatique (ENSI), University of Mannouba, in 2008 and 2014, respectively. She is a member of the scientific council of the SMART Lab (Strategies for Modelling and ARtificial inTelligence Laboratory). She is an associate professor in computer science in since September 2015 in ISG Tunis, University of Tunis. Since 2009, she has been conducting research on improving Decision-Making in complex systems such as Stock markets, Business Processes, Recommender systems. Lamjed Ben Said full professor in Computer Science Head of the SMART Lab He received the B.Sc. degree in Business Computing from the Institut Supérieur de Gestion, University of Tunis (ISG-Tunis), Tunisia, in 1998, the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Paris VI, Paris, France, in 1999 and 2003, respectively, and the Habilitation degree from the University of Tunis in 2011. He was a Research Fellow with France Telecom, Research and Development Department, Paris, for three years. From 2014 to 2020 he was the Dean of the ISG-Tunis where he is currently a Full Professor in Computer Science, University of Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia, and the Head of the SMART Lab (Strategies for Modelling and ARtificial inTelligence Laboratory). He published over 200 research papers in refereed international journals, conference proceedings, and book series. His current research interests include multi-agent simulation, multicriteria decision making, evolutionary computation, supply chain management, and behavioral economics. Dr. Ben Said is a Reviewer for several artificial intelligence journals and conferences and he is / was member / responsible of several national and international projects.