From Business Process Modeling to Data Model: A Systematic Approach

During software maintenance, software models play a fundamental role, as they assist in understanding the software that will be corrected or evolved. Business process models, generally produced using Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN), help understanding the business processes supported by software. Therefore, these models are instrumental in maintaining corporate software. However, it is common that during software maintenance, models related to the software are not updated. Thus, the models are inconsistent with the version in use of the software, becoming increasingly obsolete over time. Given that, we developed the e-VOL BPMN technique to support BPMN models' evolution during software maintenance. The objective of e-VOL BPMN is to assist software engineers and developers, with little experience in BPMN notation, to carry out the necessary evolutions in the processes supported by the software. We evaluated the e-VOL BPMN in two experiments, and the results showed evidence that e-VOL BPMN helps the evolution of BPMN models in an appropriate manner. With this technique, such professionals can keep BPMN models up to date. This makes it easier to understand the processes supported by the software, which reduces the time and cost of future maintenance. Furthermore, understanding these processes correctly can reduce undue modifications to the software, contributing to the quality of the maintained software.

Reliability of BPMN Business Processes

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a widely used standard for business process modelling and maintained by the Object Management Group (OMG). However, the BPMN 2.0 specification is quite comprehensive and spans more than 500 pages. The definition of an element is distributed across different sections and sometimes conflicting. In addition, the structure of the elements and their relationships are described within the metamodel, however, further syntactical rules are defined within the natural text. Therefore, this paper defines an ontology that formally represents the BPMN specification. This ontology is called the BPMN 2.0 Ontology and can be used as a knowledge base. The description of an element is combined within the corresponding class and further explanations are provided in annotations. This allows a much faster understanding of BPMN. In addition, the ontology is used as a syntax checker to validate concrete BPMN models.

A metamodel to integrate business processes time perspective in BPMN 2.0

BackgroundBusiness process modelling is increasingly used not only by the companies’ management but also by scientists dealing with process models. Process modeling is seldom done without decision-making nodes, which is why operational research methods are increasingly included in the process analyses.ObjectiveThis systematic literature review aimed to provide a detailed and comprehensive description of the relevant aspects of used operational research techniques in Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) model.MethodsThe Web Of Science of Clarivate Analytics was searched for 128 studies of that used operation research techniques and business process model and notation, published in English between 1 January 2004 and 18 May 2020. The inclusion criteria were as follows: Use of Operational Research methods in conjunction with the BPMN, and is available in full-text format. Articles were not excluded based on methodological quality. The background information of the included studies, as well as specific information on the used approaches, were extracted.ResultsIn this research, thirty-six studies were included and considered. A total of 11 specific methods falling into the field of Operations Research have been identified, and their use in connection with the process model was described.ConclusionOperational research methods are a useful complement to BPMN process analysis. It serves not only to analyze the probability of the process, its economic and personnel demands but also for process reengineering.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as powerful tools for automating business process modeling, promising to streamline the translation of textual process descriptions into Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) diagrams. However, the extent to which these Al systems can produce high-quality BPMN models has not yet been rigorously evaluated. This paper presents an early evaluation of five LLM-powered BPMN generation tools that automatically convert textual process descriptions into BPMN models. To assess the external quality of these Al-generated models, we introduce a novel structured evaluation framework that scores each BPMN diagram across three key process model quality dimensions: clarity, correctness, and completeness, covering both accuracy and diagram understandability. Using this framework, we conducted experiments where each tool was tasked with modeling the same set of textual process scenarios, and the resulting diagrams were systematically scored based on the criteria. This approach provides a consistent and repeatable evaluation procedure and offers a new lens for comparing LLM-based modeling capabilities. Given the focused scope of the study, the results should be interpreted as an exploratory benchmark that surfaces initial observations about tool performance rather than definitive conclusions. Our findings reveal that while current LLM-based tools can produce BPMN diagrams that capture the main elements of a process description, they often exhibit errors such as missing steps, inconsistent logic, or modeling rule violations, highlighting limitations in achieving fully correct and complete models. The clarity and readability of the generated diagrams also vary, indicating that these Al models are still maturing in generating easily interpretable process flows. We conclude that although LLMs show promise in automating BPMN modeling, significant improvements are needed for them to consistently generate both syntactically and semantically valid process models.

Business Process Model and Notation—BPMN

Currently, the number of patients with neurological diseases is increasing, especially those older than 65 suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. This development increases the emphasis on understanding and mapping treatment and care processes, not only for the elderly. Service providers (of both treatment and care) are under general pressure to decrease charges and maintain or improve existing levels of care. This situation is significantly influenced by a comprehensive knowledge of the whole process and its values. This publication therefore aims to describe the fundamental procedural aspects of caring for patients with Alzheimer’s disease, using Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). It also aims to show the possibilities of using BPMN in the description of treatment and care. Modeling of the business process is more frequently being applied not only by businesses but also by scientists involved in process models. It is used to model medical topics, with approximately 10% of its publications only, and most of these publications deal only with clinical pathways, not with overall treatment and care processes. However, the BPMN model allows the whole process of medical and nonmedical care for patients with Alzheimer’s disease to be described, including the decomposition of partial activities into individual threads and sub-processes or atomic tasks. This paper presents the BPMN modeling and mapping of the specific care path for neurodegenerative patients. The text provides a new perspective on the BPMN modeling of Alzheimer’s disease. The presented model offers the option of expanding treatment cost calculation to simulate the process using graphical tools and languages. The overall view of this system creates a much more complex concept of the system and its surroundings.

In this study, we argue that important of strategy, business, design, and technology alignment affecting an organization’s ICT enterprise architecture is also reflected by business management perspective and business process model. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an effective way to develop current and future views of the entire enterprise. EA does this primarily by integrating the processes for strategic, business and technology planning in a way that also integrates with other business and technology process. The seamless collaborate and synergize working between technology and non-technology executives and professionals are needed in the designing and formulating enterprise architecture. Therefore, in order to facilitate this analysis, we propose an approach to relate EA specified business architecture to business process innovation, modeled using Service blueprint and Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). Our approach is accompanied by a method that supports the process automation of business process model and is illustrated by a Healthcare service practice as a case study.

In 2014, the Object Management Group (OMG) published the Case Management Modeling and Notation (CMMN) version 1.0 specification, which is a new process modeling specification to complement its Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN) specification. The declarative nature of CMMN is intended to supplement the procedural perspective of BPMN. CMMN takes a data-centric view to process modeling based on business artifacts to provide flexibility for knowledge workers, while retaining the advantages of business process management (BPM) systems.

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) has become the de facto standard for process modeling. Currently, BPMN models can be (a) analyzed or simulated using specialized tools, (b) executed using business process management systems (BPMSs), or (c) used for requirements elicitation. Although there are many studies comparing BPMN to other modeling techniques for analyzing and executing processes, there are few showing the suitability of BPMN models as a source for requirements comprehension in projects where process-aware software is built without using BPMSs. This chapter presents a study aimed at comparing the comprehension of software requirements regarding a business process using either BPMN or traditional techniques, such as use cases. In our study, we analyzed responses of 120 undergraduate and graduate students regarding the requirements comprehension achieved when using only BPMN models, only use cases, or both. The results do not show significant impact of the artifacts on the comprehension level. However, when the understanding of the requirement involves sequence of activities, using the BPMN shows better results on the comprehension time.

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) has become a widely accepted standard for business process modeling. However, much of the formal verification research on BPMN is based on earlier versions and often overlooks unstructured and loop elements. This paper presents a novel approach to BPMN verification using Hoare logic. In this paper, we enhance the expressiveness and precision of BPMN by explicitly incorporating conditions into decision gateways and loop tasks. Based on this enhancement, we provide formal semantics and dynamic state explanations for BPMN diagrams. A framework is designed to partition BPMN diagrams and verify properties with our proof system based on Hoare logic, offering an intuitive, state-space explosion-free method. A logistics case study demonstrates the framework’s applicability and effectiveness.

BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) has become the de-facto business process modelling language standard. Healthcare processes have been increasingly incorporating participants other than humans, including Internet of Things (IoT) physical devices such as biomedical sensors or patient electronic tags. Due to its critical requirements, IoT-aware healthcare processes justify the relevance of Quality of Services aspects, such as reliability, availability, and cost, among others. This chapter focuses on reliability and proposes to use the Stochastic Workflow Reduction (SWR) method to calculate the reliability of IoT-aware BPMN healthcare processes. In addition, the chapter proposes a BPMN language extension to provide processes with reliability information. This way, at design time, modellers can analyse alternatives and, at run time, reliability information can be used to select participants, execute services, or monitor process executions. The proposal is applied to an Ambient Assisted Living system use case, a rich example of an IoT-aware healthcare process.

Every so often a paper is published presenting a new extension for modelling cyber security requirements in Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). The frequent production of new extensions by experts belies the need for a richer and more usable representation of security requirements in BPMN processes. In this paper, we present our work considering an analysis of existing extensions and identify the notational issues present within each of them. We discuss how there is as yet no single extension which represents a comprehensive range of cyber security concepts. Consequently there is no adequate solution for accurately specifying cyber security requirements within BPMN. In order to address this, we investigate a new approach to modelling security and propose a solution which aims to overcome current issues whilst still providing functionality to include all concepts potentially modellable in BPMN related to cyber security. We explain how our solution takes a novel approach to current challenges that is both effective and with adequate coverage of the cyber security domain.

Enhancing existing business process modeling languages with security concepts has attracted increased attention in research and several graphical notations and symbols have been proposed. How these extensions can be comprehended by users has not been evaluated yet. However, the comprehensibility of security concepts integrated within business process models is of utmost importance for many purposes such as communication, training, and later automation within a process-aware information system. If users do not understand the security concepts, this might lead to restricted acceptance or even misinterpretation and possible security problems in the sequel. In this paper, we evaluate existing security extensions of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) as BPMN constitutes the de facto standard in business modeling languages nowadays. The evaluation is conducted along two lines, i.e., a literature study and a survey. The findings of both evaluations identify shortcomings and open questions of existing approaches. This will yield the basis to convey security-related information within business process models in a comprehensible way and consequently, unleash the full effects of security modeling in business processes.