Business Process Modeling Notation

Proc. of the 10th Pacific …, 2006

Business processes evolve throughout their lifecycle of change. Business Process Modeling (BPM 2) notations such as BPMN are used to effectively conceptualize and communicate important process characteristics to relevant stakeholders. Agent-oriented conceptual modeling notations, such as i*, effectively capture and communicate organizational context. In this paper we argue that the management of change throughout the business process model lifecycle can be more effectively supported by combining notations. In particular, we identify two potential sources of process change, one occurring within the organizational context and the other within the operational context. As such the focus in this paper is on the co-evolution of operational (BPMN) and organizational (i*) models. Our intent is to provide a way of expressing changes, which arise in one model, effectively in the other model. We present constrained development methodologies capable of guiding an analyst when reflecting changes from an i* model to a BPMN model and vice-versa.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1999

Business process modelling and analysis puts specific requirements on models used and the language for expressing those models. The models should be easily understandable and analysable. In this paper we study the requirements for such a language and introduce a language that satisfies those requirements to a large extent. It was developed in the Testbed project, which aims at developing a systematic approach to business process change. The language, called AMBER, has a graphical representation, and allows to model processes, data, and the organisation and people involved in a uniform and integrated way. On the basis of a formal foundation of the language, different analyses and tool support are available. We illustrate our approach with a realistic example.

Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Applied computing - SAC '05, 2005

Business process modeling focus on describing how activities interact with other business objects while sustaining the organization's strategy. Business objects are object-oriented representations of organizational concepts, such as resources and actors, which collaborate with one another in order to achieve business goals. These objects exhibit different behavior according to each specific collaboration context. This means the perception of a business object depends on its collaborations with other objects. Business process modeling techniques do not clearly separate the multiple collaborative aspects of a business object from its internal aspects, making it difficult to understand objects which are used in different contexts, thus hindering reuse. To cope with such issues, this paper proposes using role modeling as a separation of concerns mechanism to increase the understandability and reusability of business process models. The approach divides a business process model into a business object model and a role model. The business object models deals with specifying the structure and intrinsic behavior of business objects while the role model specifies its collaborative aspects.

Computer Standards & Interfaces, 2010

At the moment the notations for the modeling of business process is based in technical aspects. Therefore most notations are not understood by the business users due to the complexity of them. In this paper we present a notation that allows business users to model their business process. For this reason the notation must be agile, easy to learn and design, and capable to provide semantic information about the process. With the objective of demonstrating the characteristics of the proposal notation in this paper we make a research to compare and evaluate the usability of the notation with the standard notation more extended, BPMN.

2006

A plethora of business process modeling techniques has been proposed over the last decades, creating a demand for theory to assist in the comparison and evaluation of these techniques. A widely established way of determining the effectiveness and efficiency of modeling techniques is by way of representational analysis. The purpose of this paper is to comparatively assess the outcomes of representational analyses of twelve popular process modeling techniques in order to provide insights into the extent to which the representational capabilities of process modeling techniques differ between each other and evolve over time, measured by the extent to which the techniques are able to facilitate complete and clear descriptions of real-world domains. Our research shows that, over time, process modeling technique have indeed increased their scope of coverage; however, this increased effectiveness of the techniques comes at the extent of increased complexity and ambiguity in the use of these techniques.

2008

Human participation in business processes needs to be addressed in process modeling. BPEL4People with WS-HumanTask covers this concern in the context of BPEL. Bound to specific workflow technology this leads to a number of problems. Firstly, maintaining and migrating processes to new or similar technologies is expensive. Secondly, the low-level, technical standards make it hard to communicate the process models to human domain experts. Model-driven approaches can help to easier cope with technology changes, and present the process models at a higher level of abstraction than offered by the technology standards. In this paper, we extend the model-driven approach with a view-based framework for business process modeling, in which models can be viewed at different abstraction levels and different concerns of a model can be viewed separately. Our approach enables developers to work with meta-models that represent a technical view on the human participation, whereas human domain experts can have an abstract view on human participation in a business process. In order to validate our work, a mapping to BPEL4People technology will be demonstrated.

2010

The Business Process Modeling Notation has emerged as a popular choice for representing processes among Business Analysts and Information Systems professionals. While the BPMN specification provides a rich syntax for the capture and representation of process models, it does not provide any guidance for the organization of the resulting models. As a consequence, large process libraries may become disorganized and hard to manage due to variability in abstraction levels, process interfaces, and activity descriptions. Based on the analysis of a process library in a US government agency we present a proposal for design guidelines and use our design guideline to qualitatively assess existing work on model quality guidance. To better organize models at different abstraction levels we propose a process architecture that allows for the systematic organization of BPMN models for different stakeholder concerns.

Ike, 2003

Existing notations for modelling information and knowledge on business processes are arbitrarily assigned to intuitively meaningless symbols. These symbolic notations are bias towards the needs of technically engineered stakeholders. A hypothesis that a proposed set of notations, Norm Process Chart, are semantically clearer than these existing notations, led to experiments to provide objective evidence in support of this. The abilities of a range of subjects to understand three business process notations were elicited. This paper briefly introduces the notations tested: Integrated Definition, Roles Activity Diagram and Norm Process Chart. It describes the experimental design and presents the results of the experiment. Data analysis from the empirical study provides objective evidence for preference of the proposed notation for representing business processes. This analysis substantiated that the results derived could not have occurred by chance. Further work suggested by the results is indicated.

Business Process Management, 2010

Existing process modelling languages and especially executable process modelling languages are not designed for business users without programming knowledge. We therefore propose a novel Lightweight Process Modelling seeking to lower the entrance barrier for modelling executable processes. In this sense lightweight applies to the user interaction and means easy to understand in the context of the modelling language and easy to deploy, implement, and execute processes in a tooling context. Hence business users get advanced guidance during their modelling activities. This paper will provide a specification of a Lightweight Process Modelling process and the Language for Lightweight Process Modelling (LLPM). The LLPM formal semantic core is fairly rich, but it is designed to be rendered in a simple graphical form without undue loss of semantics. To achieve this we followed three design principles of lightweight modelling when supporting a business user: abstracting from executable process details, using semantic annotations, and reusing process parts through patterns and templates. In order to realize these design principles we have created new elements for the LLPM that are not yet implemented in existing process modelling languages. Selected concepts of existing process modelling languages like BPMN and BPEL complement the LLPM. In this paper we present a coherent metamodel of the elements, properties, and relationships. Further a design process is defined revealing the steps of enhancing the abstract graphical process models with execution details.