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.

Querying business process model repositories

Abstract: Business process management technology is becoming increasingly popular, resulting in more and more business process models being created. Hence, there is a need for these business process models to be managed effectively. For effective business process model management, being able to efficiently query large amount of business process models is essential. For example, it is preferable to find a similar or related model to customize, rather than building a new one from scratch. This would not only save time, but would also be less error-prone and more coherent with the existing models of the enterprise. Querying large amounts of business process models efficiently is also vital during company amalgamation, in which business process models from multiple companies need to be examined and integrated. This paper provides: an overview of the field of querying business process models; a summary of its literature; and a list of challenges (and some potential solutions) that have yet to be addressed. In particular, we aim to compare the differences between querying business process models and general graph querying. We also discuss literature work from graph querying research that can be used when querying business process models.

How novices model business processes

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the design of business process diagrams in contexts where novice analysts only have basic design tools such as paper and pencils available, and little to no understanding of formalized modeling approaches. Based on a quasi-experimental study with 89 BPM students, we identify five distinct process design archetypes ranging from textual to hybrid, and graphical representation forms. We also examine the quality of the designs and identify which representation formats enable an analyst to articulate business rules, states, events, activities, temporal and geospatial information in a process model. We found that the quality of the process designs decreases with the increased use of graphics and that hybrid designs featuring appropriate text labels and abstract graphical forms are well-suited to describe business processes. Our research has implications for practical process design work in industry as well as for academic curricula on process design.

Model checking of security-sensitive business processes

Abstract: Security-sensitive business processes are business processes that must comply with security requirements (e.g. authorization constraints). In previous works it has been shown that model checking can be profitably used for the automatic analysis of security-sensitive business processes. But building a formal model that simultaneously accounts for both the workflow and the access control policy is a time consuming and error-prone activity. In this paper we present a new approach to model checking security-sensitive business processes that allows for the separate specification of the workflow and of the associated security policy while retaining the ability to carry out a fully automatic analysis of the process. To illustrate the effectiveness of the approach we describe its application to a version of the Loan Origination Process featuring an RBAC access control policy extended with delegation.

The Triconnected Abstraction of Process Models

Abstract: Companies use business process models to represent their working procedures in order to deploy services to markets, to analyze them, and to improve upon them. Competitive markets necessitate complex procedures, which lead to large process specifications with sophisticated structures. Real world process models can often incorporate hundreds of modeling constructs. While a large degree of detail complicates the comprehension of the processes, it is essential to many analysis tasks. This paper presents a technique to abstract, i.e., to simplify process models. Given a detailed model, we introduce abstraction rules which generalize process fragments in order to bring the model to a higher abstraction level. The approach is suited for the abstraction of large process specifications in order to aid model comprehension as well as decomposing problems of process model analysis. The work is based on process structure trees that have recently been introduced to the field of business process management.