Business Process Model and Notation

About: Business Process Model and Notation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 9038 publications have been published within this topic receiving 190712 citations. The topic is also known as: Business Process Modeling Notation & BPMN.

Modeling and Validating E-Commerce Business Process Based on Petri Nets

Abstract: E-commerce and online shopping with a third-party payment platform have rapidly developed recently, and encountered many fault tolerance and security problems concerned by users. The causes of these problems include malicious behavior and imperfect business processes. The latter lead to the emergence of security vulnerabilities and loss of user funds which become more and more serious these years. We focus on the business process of e-commerce, and propose a formal model for constructing an e-commerce business process called an E-commerce Business Process Net. It integrates both data and control flows based on Petri nets. Rationality and transaction consistency are defined and validated to guarantee the transaction properties of an e-commerce business process. This paper offers a complete methodology for modeling and validating an e-commerce system with a third-party payment platform from the view point of a business process. Its use enables a designer to identify errors early in the design process and correct them before the deployment phase. In order to demonstrate the applicability and feasibility of the methodology, we have modeled and validated a real-world e-commerce business process and discovered the problems that cause the violation of transaction properties.

Process-based design and integration of wireless sensor network applications

Abstract: Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSNs) are distributed sensor and actuator networks that monitor and control real-world phenomena, enabling the integration of the physical with the virtual world. They are used in domains like building automation, control systems, remote healthcare, etc., which are all highly process-driven. Today, tools and insights of Business Process Modeling (BPM) are not used to model WSN logic, as BPM focuses mostly on the coordination of people and IT systems and neglects the integration of embedded IT. WSN development still requires significant special-purpose, low-level, and manual coding of process logic. By exploiting similarities between WSN applications and business processes, this work aims to create a holistic system enabling the modeling and execution of executable processes that integrate, coordinate, and control WSNs. Concretely, we present a WSN-specific extension for Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and a compiler that transforms the extended BPMN models into WSN-specific code to distribute process execution over both a WSN and a standard business process engine. The developed tool-chain allows modeling of an independent control loop for the WSN.

Social software for modeling business processes

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to show how the use of social networks may help users to behave as modelers they trust. Users are guided in this respect within the context of an existing Recommendation-Based Process Modeling Support System to which “social” features are added. Two kinds of social networks are used to this end: (1) a social network from a process model repository and (2) a social network from a recommendation history. The social network from process models provides an organizational view of business processes. An example of the information that could be derived from such a network is the average distance between performers who belong to part of business process that is already modeled and the ones who belong to a candidate process. A user can apply this result to complete a process model in a way that is similar to earlier selected solutions. The social network from recommendation history shows the relationship among modelers who use the recommendation system. From its usage history, social networks can be generated that express the similarity between its nodes (users). Both approaches are presented as effective ways to exploit social relationships in capturing business processes in conceptual models, one of the key activities in the BPM domain.

A semantic approach for business process model abstraction

Abstract: Models of business processes can easily become large and difficult to understand. Abstraction has proven to be an effective means to present a readable, high-level view of a business process model, by showing aggregated activities and leaving out irrelevant details. Yet, it is an open question how to combine activities into high-level tasks in a way that corresponds to such actions by experienced modelers. In this paper, an approach is presented that exploits semantic information within a process model, beyond structural information, to decide on which activities belong to one another. In an experimental validation, we used an industrial process model repository to compare this approach with actual modeling decisions, showing a strong correlation between the two. As such, this paper contributes to the development of modeling support for the application of effective process model abstraction, easing the use of business process models in practice.

On the transformation of control flow between block-oriented and graph-oriented process modelling languages

Abstract: Much recent research work discusses the transformation between different process modelling languages. This work, however, is mainly focussed on specific process modelling languages, and thus the general reusability of the applied transformation concepts is rather limited. In this paper, we aim to abstract from concrete transformations by distinguishing two major paradigms for representing control flow in process modelling languages: block-oriented languages (such as BPEL and BPML) and graph-oriented languages (such as BPMN, EPCs, and YAWL). The contribution of this paper are generic strategies for transforming from block-oriented process languages to graph-oriented languages, and vice versa.