scholarly journals Integrating BPMN and DMN: Modeling and Analysis

Author(s):  
Massimiliano de Leoni ◽  
Paolo Felli ◽  
Marco Montali

AbstractThe operational backbone of modern organizations is the target of business process management, where business process models are produced to describe how the organization should react to events and coordinate the execution of activities so as to satisfy its business goals. At the same time, operational decisions are made by considering internal and external contextual factors, according to decision models that are typically based on declarative, rule-based specifications that describe how input configurations correspond to output results. The increasing importance and maturity of these two intertwined dimensions, those of processes and decisions, have led to a wide range of data-aware models and associated methodologies, such as BPMN for processes and DMN for operational decisions. While it is important to analyze these two aspects independently, it has been pointed out by several authors that it is also crucial to analyze them in combination. In this paper, we provide a native, formal definition of DBPMN models, namely data-aware and decision-aware processes that build on BPMN and DMN S-FEEL, illustrating their use and giving their formal execution semantics via an encoding into Data Petri nets (DPNs). By exploiting this encoding, we then build on previous work in which we lifted the classical notion of soundness of processes to this richer, data-aware setting, and show how the abstraction and verification techniques that were devised for DPNs can be directly used for DBPMN models. This paves the way towards even richer forms of analysis, beyond that of assessing soundness, that are based on the same technique.

Author(s):  
Javier Fabra ◽  
Valeria de Castro ◽  
Verónica Andrea Bollati ◽  
Pedro Álvarez ◽  
Esperanza Marcos

The business goals of an enterprise process are traced to business process models with the aim of being carried out during the execution stage. The automatic translation from these models to fully executable code that can be simulated and round-trip engineered is still an open challenge in the Business Process Management field. Model-driven Engineering has proposed a set of methodologies to solve the existing gap between business analysts and software developers, but the expected results have not been reached yet. In order to rise to this challenge, in this chapter the authors propose a solution based on the integration of three previous proposals: SOD-M, DENEB, and MeTAGeM. On the one hand, SOD-M is a model-driven method for the development of service-oriented systems. Business analysts can use SOD-M to transform their business goals into composition service models, a type of model that represents business processes. On the other hand, DENEB is a platform for the development and execution of flexible business processes, represented by means of workflow models. The authors' approach focuses on the automatic transformation of SOD-M models to DENEB workflow models, resulting in a business process that is coded by a class of high-level Petri-nets, and it is directly executable in DENEB. The model transformation process has been automated using the MeTAGeM tool, which automatically generates the set of ATL rules required to transform SOD-M models to DENEB workflows. Finally, the integration of the three proposals has been illustrated by means of a real system related to the management of medical images.


Author(s):  
Verena Geist ◽  
Christa Illibauer ◽  
Christine Natschläger ◽  
Robert Hutter

Business Process customization is an active research area in the process management field, dealing with variations/commonalities among processes of a given process family and runtime adaptations of single process instances. Many theoretical approaches have been suggested in the last years; however, practical implementations are rare and limited in their functionality. In this article, a new approach is proposed for capturing customizable process models based on well-known graph transformation techniques and with focus on practical aspects like definition of variation points, linking and propagation of changes, visual highlighting of differences in process variants, and dynamically selecting a specific variant at runtime. The suggested concepts are discussed within case studies, comprising different graph transformation systems for generating process variants supporting (a) variability by restriction, (b) variability by restriction and by extension, and (c) runtime adaptations due to the executing actor. The overall approach is being implemented in the FireStart BPM suite.


Author(s):  
Ivana Rábová

The article deals with two principles of business workflow modeling, Petri nets and UML notation, that are the acceptable approaches to business modeling and can be used also for business documents workflow. The special type of Petri nets, WF-nets and UML activity diagrams are used in this article and both modeling ways are presented on the concrete business workflow and then there are presented and specified their advantage and disadvantage for business documents flows. At beginning it is explained the word workflow in context business documents, its features, principles and using in business environment. After that it is clarified that the UML is OMG’s most-used specification, and the way the world models not only application structure, behavior, and architecture, but also business process, workflows and data structure. Activity diagram UML is good way to show how different workflows in the business are managed, how they start, go and stop. Diagrams also show many different decision paths that can be taken from start to finish. State charts can be used as a detail the transitions or changes of states when documents can go through in the business. They show how a documents moves from one state to another and the rules that govern that change. Petri-nets offer a graphical notation for stepwise processes that include choice, iteration, and concurrent execution. Unlike UML Petri nets have an exact mathematical definition of their execution semantics, with a well-developed mathematical theory for process analysis. In the article there are modeled a special type of Petri nets, the WF-nets. The practical part of article incorporates two models of concrete business documents workflows presented in these notations, their comparison and recommendation for using these diagrams in business process management.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-46
Author(s):  
Florian Spree

Predictive process monitoring is a subject of growing interest in academic research. As a result, an increased number of papers on this topic have been published. Due to the high complexity in this research area a wide range of different experimental setups and methods have been applied which makes it very difficult to reliably compare research results. This paper's objective is to investigate how business process models and their characteristics are used during experimental setups and how they can contribute to academic research. First, a literature review is conducted to analyze and discuss the awareness of business process models in experimental setups. Secondly, the paper discusses identified research problems and proposes the concept of a web-based business process model metric suite and the idea of ranked metrics. Through a metric suite researchers and practitioners can automatically evaluate business process model characteristics in their future work. Further, a contextualization of metrics by introducing a ranking of characteristics can potentially indicate how the outcome of experimental setups will be. Hence, the paper's work demonstrates the importance of business process models and their characteristics in the context of predictive process monitoring and proposes the concept of a tool approach and ranking to reliably evaluate business process models characteristics.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuno Castela ◽  
Paulo Dias ◽  
Marielba Zacarias ◽  
José Tribolet

Business process models are often forgotten after their creation and its representation is not usually updated. This appears to be negative as processes evolve over time. This paper discusses the issue of business process models maintenance through the definition of a collaborative method that creates interaction contexts enabling business actors to discuss about business processes, sharing business knowledge. The collaboration method extends the discussion about existing process representations to all stakeholders promoting their update. This collaborative method contributes to improve business process models, allowing updates based in change proposals and discussions, using a groupware tool that was developed. Four case studies were developed in real organizational environment. We came to the conclusion that the defined method and the developed tool can help organizations to maintain a business process model updated based on the inputs and consequent discussions taken by the organizational actors who participate in the processes.


Author(s):  
Vitus S. W. Lam

Originating from a pragmatic need to document strategies for modelling recurrent business scenarios, collections of workflow patterns have been proposed in the business process management community. The concrete applications of these workflow patterns in forward engineering have been extensively explored. Conversely, the core concern of business process archaeology is on recovering business process models from legacy systems utilizing reverse engineering methods. Little attention is given to the relationship between business process recovery and workflow patterns. This chapter aims to give a compact introduction to workflow control-flow patterns, workflow data patterns, workflow exception patterns, and service interaction patterns. In particular, the feasibility of combining workflow patterns with business process archaeology is examined by drawing on the research results of the MARBLE framework.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1004-1016
Author(s):  
Hanane Lhannaoui ◽  
Mohammed Issam Kabbaj ◽  
Zohra Bakkoury

For organizations, risk is a key concept when dealing with business process. Integrating risks aspects during business process management starts with an accurate consideration of risk's characteristics in the modelling phase. Most research is needed on integrating risk and business process modelling. Actually, the literature suggests various approaches to represent risk-related information in business process models. The diversity of those methods and the fact that this domain is still emerging make it difficult to choose the most suitable language. This paper aims to represent a survey of the existing risk-annotated business process model's notations.


Author(s):  
Pnina Soffer ◽  
Maya Kaner ◽  
Yair Wand

A common way to represent organizational domains is the use of business process models. A Workflow-net (WF-net) is an application of Petri Nets (with additional rules) that model business process behavior. However, the use of WF-nets to model business processes has some shortcomings. In particular, no rules exist beyond the general constraints of WF-nets to guide the mapping of an actual process into a net. Syntactically correct WF-nets may provide meaningful models of how organizations conduct their business processes. Moreover, the processes represented by these nets may not be feasible to execute or reach their business goals when executed. In this paper, the authors propose a set of rules for mapping the domain in which a process operates into a WF-net, which they derived by attaching ontological semantics to WF-nets. The rules guide the construction of WF-nets, which are meaningful in that their nodes and transitions are directly related to the modeled (business) domains. Furthermore, the proposed semantics imposes on the process models constraints that guide the development of valid process models, namely, models that assure that the process can accomplish its goal when executed.


Author(s):  
Bernd Heinrich ◽  
Mathias Klier ◽  
Steffen Zimmermann

Companies need to adapt their processes quickly in order to react to changing customer demands or new regulations, for example. Process models are an appropriate means to support process setup but currently the (re)design of process models is a time-consuming manual task. Semantic Business Process Management, in combination with planning approaches, can alleviate this drawback. This means that the workload of (manual) process modeling could be reduced by constructing models in an automated way. Since existing, traditional planning algorithms show drawbacks for the application in Semantic Business Process Management, we introduce a novel approach that is suitable especially for the Semantic-based Planning of process models. In this chapter, we focus on the semantic reasoning, which is necessary in order to construct control structures, such as decision nodes, which are vital elements of process models. We illustrate our approach by a running example taken from the financial services domain. Moreover, we demonstrate its applicability by a prototype and provide some insights into the evaluation of our approach.


Author(s):  
Fernando Belfo

Computer games conceptualization and development are processes that have particular features with significant complexity. The life cycle at computer games development should attend the dynamism, the challenge and the opportunities of the game market. Business process management (BPM) pretends to give an alternative perspective of management to the departmental and hierarchical one. Game firm’s business should be seen with an integrated attitude, incentivising employees from different departments to work together in the same process with a common mission and persecuting same objectives. The importance of integrating the strategic level plans and the task level deployment is crucial for increased alignment and so, organizational performance. This can be better done if there is a process strategy definition, which links strategic initiatives with all needs of a process infrastructure. The processes´ standardizing tendency opens the chance to outsource parts of them bringing possible benefits to game firm and customers. The definition of a clear framework at the strategic level allows lower processes description and global business process architecture specification. Other important aspects of business process management approach at computer games industry should include ownership clarification, performance measurement mechanisms and obviously the identification and activation of improvement opportunities. Author elects business processes customization, integration of flows between firm and its supply chain partners and superior user interfaces using specialized workflow tools as being three improvement opportunities at games industry. In addition to those components, three additional extra concepts are considered critical to have a complete understanding of BPM. They are the conscious process management, the macro process management and the centrality of process. This chapter is going to follow these vectors in order to understand possible opportunities powered by BPM to gain competitive advantages in computer game industry.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document