Toward the Formalization of Business Process Model and Notation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Honoré Hounwanou ◽  
Laila Boumlik ◽  
Mohamed Mejri

Due to its versatility and wide variety of constructs, BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) is today the leading standard notation for creating visual models of business or organizational processes. It is a rich and expressive graphical language specially designed to provide a notation that is easily understood by all members of a company. Sometimes, however, this large number of controls and action nodes available can become a weakness since a given semantics can be represented in many ways, causing some ambiguity and raising the question of bisimilarity between two models. Today, it is universally recognized that formal methods are useful for the specification, design and verification of almost all systems, and essential for the most critical ones. On the other hand, the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) is an executable language structured in blocks, supported by many execution platforms, making it possible to specify the actions in the business processes with Web services. Since BPMN and BPEL share almost the same level of abstraction, we present in this article a formalization of the BPMN language through a mapping to BPEL, aiming to remove its ambiguities, to solve the complex modeling and interaction problems and open the door to many formal analysis such as model checking. We first formalize the BPEL language using the K framework, we then map the BPMN language to this formalized version of BPEL. The K Framework is a rewriting/reachability based framework enabling language developers to formally define all programming languages. Once a language is formally specified in the K framework, the framework automatically outputs a range of formal verification tool sets, compilers, debuggers and other developer tools for it.

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (04) ◽  
pp. 1450003 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Teresa Gómez-López ◽  
Rafael M. Gasca ◽  
José Miguel Pérez-Álvarez

In a business process, the information that flows between the activities can be introduced by those users who interact with the process. This introduced information could be incorrect due to a lack of knowledge or a mistake. For this reason and to make the business process execution consistent, we propose a Decision Support System (DSS) to inform the user about the possible and correct values that the input data can take. The DSS takes into account the business process model and the policy of the company. The policy concerning the input data and dataflow that the company manages can be represented by constraints (called Business Data Constraints (BDCs)). In order to ascertain all the possible values of the input data that permit the execution of the process following the defined goals, the DSS analyzes the business process model and the BDC, using the constraint programming paradigm.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 170
Author(s):  
Hilman Nuril Hadi

Business process model was created to make it easier for business process stakeholders to communicate and discuss the structure of the process more effectively and efficiently. Business process models can also be business artifacts and media that can be analyzed further to improve and maintain organizational competitiveness. To analyze business processes in a structured manner, the effect/results of the execution of business processes will be one of the important information. The effect/result of the execution of certain activities or a business process as a whole are useful for managing business processes, including for improvements related to future business processes. This effect annotation approach needs to be supported by business process modeling tools to assist business analysts in managing business processes properly. In previous research, the author has developed a plugin that supports business analysts to describe the effects semantically attached to activities in the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) business process model. In this paper, the author describes the unit testing process and its results on the plugin of semantic effect annotation that have been developed. Unit testing was carried out using the basic path testing technique and has obtained three test paths. The results of unit test for plugin are also described in this paper.


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.


2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Montilva ◽  
Judith Barrios ◽  
Isabel Besembel ◽  
William Montilva

The successful application of Information Technologies (IT) in an organization depends on the business processes used for managing such technologies. It is widely recognized that the use of the Enterprise Architecture (EA) practice for organizing these technologies into a framework is a key factor for achieving a better IT - business alignment. This article presents a business process model for the IT Management that can be used in medium and large organizations as a framework for modelling and analysing their IT management processes. The main difference between the described model and others found in the literature is that our model places EA concept at the centre of the organization of IT Management activities. It provides a better definition, organization and comprehension of the essential and support IT management activities. The described model is being used in several organizations as a referential framework to improve their current IT Management processes.


Author(s):  
Yuhong Yan ◽  
Philippe Dague ◽  
Yannick Pencolé ◽  
Marie-Odile Cordier

Web services based on a service-oriented architecture framework provide a suitable technical foundation for business process management and integration. A business process can be composed of a set of Web services that belong to different companies and interact with each other by sending messages. Web service orchestration languages are defined by standard organizations to describe business processes composed of Web services. A business process can fail for many reasons, such as faulty Web services or mismatching messages. It is important to find out which Web services are responsible for a failed business process because we could penalize these Web services and exclude them from the business process in the future. In this paper, we propose a model-based approach to diagnose the faults in a Web service-composed business process. We convert a Web service orchestration language, more specifically BPEL4WS, into synchronized automata, so that we have a formal description of the topology and variable dependency of the business process. After an exception is thrown, the diagnoser can calculate the business process execution trajectory based on the formal model and the observed evolution of the business process. The faulty Web services are deduced from the variable dependency on the execution trajectory. We demonstrate our diagnosis technique with an example.


Author(s):  
Juan Federico Gómez Estupiñán

Resumen El objetivo del artículo es caracterizar el estándar Business Process Model and Notation BPMN, como herramienta gráfica para el modelado de los procesos de negocio de una organización, y realizar un análisis crítico de las posibilidades que ofrece, identificando sus ventajas y desventajas para representar adecuadamente aspectos como actores, actividades, eventos, flujos de trabajo, controles y recursos entre otros. Para verificar la funcionalidad que ofrece BPMN, se usó como caso de estudio ‘Alquiler de Vehículos’, que incluye los procesos básicos de compra, gestión, alquiler y venta de vehículo. Se encontró que la versión BPMN 2.0, incluye un conjunto de prestaciones adicionales que permiten modelar en forma completa y precisa los procesos de negocio, condición necesaria para que a partir de estos modelos se pueda implementar correctamente el sistema de gestión de procesos de negocio, utilizando una herramienta válida para tal fin. Se concluye que BPMN es una herramienta sencilla, fácil de comprender, pero con una gran potencialidad para el modelado de procesos de cualquier tipo de organización. Palabras Clave: Business Process Management BPM, Business Process Model and Notation BPMN, Alquiler de Vehículos, Business Process Management Suite BPMS.   Abstract The aim of this paper is to describe the standard Business Process Model and Notation BPMN, graphic tool for modeling business processes of an organization, and critical analysis of the possibilities, identifying advantages and disadvantages to adequately represent aspects as actors, activities, events, workflows, controls and resources among others. To verify the functionality offered BPMN, is used as a case study ‘Rent a Car’, which includes the basic processes of acquisition, management, leasing and sale of vehicle. We found that this standard, particularly BPMN version 2.0, includes a set of additional features that allow you to model a complete and accurate business processes, necessary condition for that since these models are able to successfully implement the business process management system, using a valid tool for this purpose. We conclude that BPMN is a simple tool, easy to understand, but with a great potential for modeling processes of any type of organization. Keywords: Business Process Management BPM, Business Process Model and Notation BPMN, Rent a Car, Business Process Management Suite BPMS.


2011 ◽  
pp. 1970-1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuhong Yan ◽  
Philippe Dague ◽  
Yannick Pencolé ◽  
Marie-Odile Cordier

Web service orchestration languages are defined to describe business processes composed of Web services. A business process can fail for many reasons, such as faulty Web services or mismatching messages. It is important to find out which Web services are responsible for a failed business process because we could penalize these Web services and exclude them from the business process in the future. In this paper, we propose a model-based approach to diagnose the faults in a Web service-composed business process. We convert a Web service orchestration language, BPEL4WS, into synchronized automata, so that we have a formal description of the topology and variable dependency of the business process. After an exception is thrown, the diagnoser can calculate the business process execution trajectory based on the formal model and the observed evolution of the business process. The faulty Web services are deduced from the variable dependency on the execution trajectory.


Author(s):  
Maria Estrela Ferreira da Cruz ◽  
Ricardo J. Machado ◽  
Maribel Yasmina Santos

The constant change and rising complexity of organizations, mainly due to the transforming nature of their business processes, has driven the increase of interest in business process management by organizations. It is recognized that knowing business processes can help to ensure that the software under development will meet the business needs. Some of software development processes (like unified process) already refer to business process modeling as a first effort in the software development process. A business process model usually is created under the supervision, clarification, approval, and validation of the business stakeholders. Thus, a business process model is a proper representation of the reality (as is or to be), having lots of useful information that can be used in the development of the software system that will support the business. The chapter uses the information existing in business process models to derive software models specially focused in generating a data model.


Author(s):  
Muhammad Ahtisham Aslam ◽  
Sören Auer ◽  
Klaus-Peter Fähnrich

The business process execution language for Web services (BPEL4WS, shortly BPEL) is one of the most popular languages and de facto standard for modelling business processes as Web services compositions. However, it only allows using hard-coded syntactical interfaces for partners and the process itself, i.e. semantic descriptions of services cannot be used within a process model. The lacks of an ontological description of the process elements cause limitations in the ways services are used within a process. A service providing the same functionality as the one referenced in the process model, but via a different syntactical interface, cannot be used instead. As a result, a process model cannot find an alternate service that performs the same functionality but exposes a different interface and can crash. Also, another drawback of such business processes is that they expose syntactical interfaces and cannot be discovered and composed dynamically by other semantic enabled systems slowing down the process of interaction between business partners. OWL-S on the other hand is suite of OWL ontologies and can be used to describe the compositions of Web services on the basis of matching semantics as well as to expose semantically enriched interfaces of business processes. Consequently, translating BPEL process descriptions to OWL-S suite of ontologies can overcome syntactical limitations of BPEL processes enabling them to 1) edit and model the composition of Web services on the basis of matching semantics 2) provide semantically enriched information of business processes. This semantically enriched information helps for dynamic and automated discovery, invocation and composition of business processes as Semantic Web services. Describing an approach and its implementation that can be used to enable business processes for semantic based dynamic discovery, invocation and composition by translating BPEL process descriptions to OWL-S suite of ontologies is the aim of this chapter.


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