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.

Auditing Business Process Compliance

Abstract: Compliance issues impose significant management and reporting requirements upon organizations. We present an approach to enhance business process modeling notations with the capability to detect and resolve many broad compliance related issues. We provide a semantic characterization of a minimal revision strategy that helps us obtain compliant process models from models that might be initially non-compliant, in a manner that accommodates the structural and semantic dimensions of parsimoniously annotated process models. We also provide a heuristic approach to compliance resolution using a notion of compliance patterns. This allows us to partially automate compliance resolution, leading to reduced levels of analyst involvement and improved decision support.

Web Services and Business Transactions

Abstract: Process oriented workflow systems and e-business applications require transactional support in order to orchestrate loosely coupled services into cohesive units of work and guarantee consistent and reliable execution. In this paper we introduce a multi-level transaction model that provides the necessary independence for the participating resource managers, e.g., local database and workflow servers, of organisations engaging in business transactions that are composed of interacting web services. We also present a taxonomy of e-business transaction features such as unconventional atomicity criteria, the need for support for business conversations and the need for distinguishing between three basic business transaction phases. In addition, we review current research and standard activities and outline the main ingredients of a business transaction framework necessary for building flexible e-business applications.

Capturing variability in business process models: the Provop approach

Abstract: Usually, for a particular business process different variants exist. Each of them constitutes an adjustment of a reference process model to specific requirements building the process context. Contemporary process management tools do not adequately support the modeling of such process variants. Either the variants have to be specified as separate process models or they are expressed in terms of conditional branches within the same process model. Both methods often lead to redundancies making model adaptations a time-consuming and error-prone task. In this article, we discuss selected concepts of the Provop approach for modeling and managing process variants. A particular process variant can be configured at a high level of abstraction by applying a set of well-defined change operations to a reference process model. In particular, this article discusses advanced concepts for the design and modeling of such a reference process model as well as for the adjustments required to configure the different process variants. Altogether, Provop provides a flexible and powerful solution for process variant management. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Complexity metrics for business process models

Abstract: Business process models, often modelled using graphical languages like UML, serve as a base for communication between the stakeholders in the software development process. To fulfill this purpose, they should be easy to understand and easy to maintain. For this reason, it is useful to have measures that can give us some information about understandability and maintainability of a business process model. Such measures should tell us whether the model has an appropriate size, is clearly structured, easy to comprehend and partitioned into modules in a sensible way. This paper discusses how existing research results on the complexity of software can be extended in order to analyze the complexity of business process models.

A discourse on complexity of process models

Abstract: Complexity has undesirable effects on, among others, the correctness, maintainability, and understandability of business process models. Yet, measuring complexity of business process models is a rather new area of research with only a small number of contributions. In this paper, we survey findings from neighboring disciplines on how complexity can be measured. In particular, we gather insight from software engineering, cognitive science, and graph theory, and discuss in how far analogous metrics can be defined on business process models.