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.

An Ontological Approach to Business Process Modeling

Abstract: Business people use informal methods to represent business processes (BP), having the main objective to support an enterprise organization. On the other hand, application software is increasingly based on Service Oriented Architectures, where the application logic is represented by executable BP (e.g., by using BPEL.) Despite both are aiming at BP modelling, the methods used by business people and IT specialists are quite different. The former use informal, descriptive methods, with an intuitive semantics difficult to be translated to the formal representation needed in the IT world. This paper presents the main lines of an ontological framework for the representation of BP semantics: BPAL (Business Process Abstract Language.) It is primarily conceived to provide a formal semantics to BPMN, an informal BP modelling method that is emerging in the business world. The modelling categories of BPAL are based on well accepted business notions, such as activity, decision, role. We believe that it may be useful beyond BPMN, in more general business contexts. BPAL is an abstract language (no drawing symbols are provided) having a procedural semantics (allowing a translation to an executable form, BPEL), and a declarative semantics, to be processed by an inference engine.

System and method for using a component business model to organize an enterprise

Abstract: A system and method is described for using a component business model to partition a business into non-overlapping components, and then allocating different components to appropriate organizing strategies, based on attribute values assigned to each component. In the best mode of implementation there are two attributes: whether or not the component differentiates the business within the market place; and whether the component is industry standard or is tailored by the organization. These attributes and their values map the components of the business to a matrix. Based on the combination of attribute values in each cell of the matrix, available organizing strategies are also mapped to the matrix, thereby identifying for each component an appropriate organizing strategy.

Methods of comparing and merging business process configurations

Abstract: Exemplary methods and systems consistent with the present invention allow a user to compare different versions of a business application using an object-oriented model of the business application. By transforming business application structures into object-oriented structures, such as object-oriented language constructs, structures, and other elements, individual differences between versions of the business applications may be identified and displayed to a user, for example, on a user interface. A user may display object-oriented models of the business application representing, for instance, the latest control version, the latest deployed version, and a test version including test modifications. Having all three versions represented in object-oriented models allows a user to perform a three-way comparison between the object-oriented models, increasing productivity and efficiency of maintaining, debugging, modifying, controlling and deploying the business application.

Modeling and Analyzing the Carbon Footprint of Business Processes

Abstract: Many corporations and individuals realize that environmental sustainability is an urgent problem to address In this chapter, we contribute to the emerging academic discussion by proposing two innovative approaches for engaging in the development of environmentally sustainable business processes Specifically, we describe an extended process modeling approach for capturing and documenting the dioxide emissions produced during the execution of a business process For illustration, we apply this approach to the case of a governmental Shared Services provider Second, we then introduce an analysis method for measuring the carbon dioxide emissions produced during the execution of a business process To illustrative this approach, we apply it in the real-life case of an European airport and show how this information can be leveraged in the re-design of “green” business processes

Formal Behavioral Modeling and Compliance Analysis for Service-Oriented Systems

Abstract: In this paper, we present a framework for formal modeling and verification of service-based business processes with focus on their compliance to external regulations such as Segregation of Duties (SoD) or privacy protection policies. In our framework, control/data flow is modeled using the exogenous coordination language Reo. Reo process models are designed from scratch or (semi-)automatically obtained from BPMN, UML or WS-BPEL specifications. Constraint automata (CA), a semantic model for Reo, provide state-based representations of process workflows and enable their verification by means of model checking technology. Various extensions of CA make it possible to analyze time-, resource- and Quality-of-Service (QoS) process models.