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Context: Business Process Automation (BPA) is adopted by organizations to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase overall business performance. Traditional Business Process Automation (TBPA) is one of the main approaches employed to develop a BPA. TBPA entails the development of BPA in a programming language to integrate relevant applications in the digital ecosystem to execute a given process. Process variability and practitioner unavailability are issues that encumber the requirements engineering for TBPA software. Objective: This work proposes Requirements with Logs (RWL), a log-based approach for TBPA software to reduce the impact of these issues, by providing a higher alignment among business process requirements and software architecture, and employing process mining to semi-automatically discover the business process during requirements elicitation. Method: The research conducted a case study in a technology institute to assess RWL and report its results in practice. Results: The results revealed significant improvements in adaptability to business process changes, in time spent with practitioners, and in software development. RWL also presented limitations, including human intervention to accurately obtain the business process, complexity to trace the process into the architecture, data privacy concerns, and risk of network traffic overload. Conclusion: This research demonstrated the effectiveness of RWL to minimize the impact of process variability and the dependence on practitioners.

Abstract Most of the discarded plastics originate mainly from food and beverage packaging, thus the consumer's perception of biodegradable packaging must be understood. This study aimed to investigate the consumer perception of biodegradable packaging films made of pectin and whey protein isolate. An online questionnaire was conducted to assess the consumer responses. Results showed that the majority of consumers (77.3%) did not observe the biodegradability of the packaging during purchase, although biodegradable packaging can positively affect the purchase decision (71.9%). The acceptance, purchase intention, and preference are influenced by visual aspects, and the consumers preferred lighter and more transparent films, with less saturated colors. Consumers established correlations between color and transparency with film thickness and resistance, these correlations were not observed in the physical analysis of the film. In addition, a variety of applications were highlighted for the films produced, demonstrating the effectiveness of these materials for food and beverage packaging.

In order to evaluate the influence of a different assembly of biocomposites of polyvinyl alcohol (PVOH), whey protein isolates (WPI), and nano-silica (NS), a bilayer film treated with corona discharge was produced through a two-step lamination. The first layer of PVOH/NS, treated with up to 90 s of discharge, and the second layer of WPI/NS, the bilayer films had their morphology, tensile strength, and water barrier investigated and compared to a single layer PVOH/WPI/NS film. Corona discharge increased the wettability of the first layer, improving the ability to interact with the second layer, thus increasing the adherence between these layers. Films treated with higher times of discharge showed a homogeneous transition between phases, suggesting compatibility, and adherence between layers. At 90 s of corona discharge treatment, bilayer films showed a tensile strength 72% higher than the bilayer film not treated and also 23% more resistant and 7.4 times more ductile than the single-layer film. The lamination process and corona treatment increase the affinity of water with film constituents, thus leading to a higher permeability. The use of corona discharge associated with the lamination of PVOH/WPI/NS biocomposites provides a bilayer film and produces a more resistant, flexible, and ductile biocomposite film for packaging. KEYWORDS bilayer packaging film, biocomposite, Corona discharge, nano-silica, polyvinyl alcohol, whey protein isolate, 1 | INTRODUCTION One of the biggest markets for plastics is that of packaging, which is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 4.2% from 2021 to [...]