BPRisk: risk-aware workflow planning and optimisation

It is essential to ensure that cultural heritage is preserved and accessible for the long term, but long-term digital preservation is threatened by format obsolescence, media degradation, and failures in the very people, processes and systems designed to keep the content safe and accessible. Both digitised and born-digital AV content presents new challenges for preservation and Quality Assurance (QA) beyond the current strategies for avoiding, mitigating and recovering from digital AV loss involving QA tools and file replication to repair files that may be damaged while in the archive.

Here we introduce a new tool developed in the DAVID project to address these preservation challenges:

BPRisk Web Application

The Business Process Risk management framework (BPRisk) allows users to plan and manage workflow processes with regards to risk. In the DAVID project, these are risks that threaten long-term preservation of digital AV content, i.e., avoiding damage and ensuring that the content can be accessed in the future.

BPRisk allows users to design BPMN 2.0 workflows in a Workflow Designer, and then specify risks for the different tasks in the workflow. A semantic risk model is used to assist non-expert users by identifying and classifying potential risks to known preservation activities.

The users can improve cost-benefit by identifying key vulnerabilities and target investments accordingly. This is achieved via a Simulation Centre, where the users can simulate the execution of their preservation workflows. This gives quantifications of risk occurrences and allows them to estimate the impact of the risks, e.g., in financial terms – dealing with risk occurrences costs both time and money. The BPRisk simulation tool also allows different simulation scenarios to be explored, e.g., to determine the potential ROI of investing in a QC tool for controlling a particular risk.

Using this tool, preservation workflow managers can simulate and optimise their workflow before executing them, using a product such as CubeWorkflow from Cube-Tec International, one of the DAVID partners,

BPRisk has been designed to support continual process improvement. A Risk Feedback Centre displays workflow execution (preservation) metadata to the users, exposing information about risk occurrences, for example. Based on such information, the simulations may be re-calibrated and the user may decide to update the workflow itself.

More Info

More details and results from the simulation capabilities of the framework applied to an MXF Repair workflow are discussed in D3.3 DAVID-D3.3-Final-IT-Strategies-Risk-Framework, a public DAVID report.