R-BPMN for abstract modeling of business process patterns

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.

A metamodel to integrate business processes time perspective in BPMN 2.0

Reliability of BPMN Business Processes

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.

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.

Business Process Model and Notation—BPMN

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 most important result to standardize the notation for graphical representation of Business Processes (BPs) is the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). Despite the BPs modeled with BPMN being able to support business designers, BPMN models are not appropriate to support the analysis phase. BPMN models have no formal seman- tics to conduct qualitative analysis (validation and verification). In this work is presented how Model Checking (MC) verification technique for software and Timed Automata (TA) formal language are integrated within a formal verification approach to check BPs mod- eled with BPMN. Also, are introduced a set of guideline to transform BPMN models into TA. The use of our approach allow to business analysts and designers to perform evaluation (i.e., qualitative analysis) of BPs, based on the formal specification of BP–task model with TA. The application of the approach is aimed to evaluate the behavior of the BP–task model with respect to business performance indicators (for instance, service time, waiting time or queue size) derived from business needs, as is shown in an instance of an enterprise–project related to Customer Relationship Management.
 
 

Business Process and Practice Alignment Meta-model

Effective monitoring and testing during each step are essential for document verification in research and development (R&D) projects. In software development, proper testing is required to verify it carefully and constantly because of the invisibility features of software. However, not enough studies on test processes for R&D projects have been done. Thus, in this paper, we introduce a Test Maturity Model integration (TMMi)-based software field R&D test process that offers five integrity levels and makes the process compatible for different types of projects. The Software & Systems Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM) is used widely in the software process-modeling context, but it lacks built-in enactment capabilities, so there is no tool or process engine that enables one to execute the process models described in SPEM. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)-based workflow engines can be a solution for process execution, but process models described in SPEM need to be converted to BPMN models. Thus, we propose an approach to support enactment of SPEM-based process models by converting them into business processes. We show the effectiveness of our approach through converting software R&D test processes specified in SPEM in a case study.

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.

Business process models expressed in languages such as BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation), play a critical role in implementing the workflows in modern enterprises. However, control flow errors such as deadlocks and lack of synchronization, and syntactic errors arising out of poor modeling practices often occur in industrial process models. A major challenge is to provide the means and methods to detect such errors and more importantly, to identify the location of each error. In this work, we develop a formal framework of diagnosing errors by locating their occurrence nodes in business process models at the level of sub-processes and swim-lanes. We use graph-theoretic techniques and Petri net-based analyses to detect syntactic and control flow-related errors respectively. While syntactic errors can be easily located on the processes themselves, we project control-related errors on processes using a mapping from Petri nets to processes. We use this framework to analyze a sample of 174 industrial BPMN process models having 1262 sub-processes in which we identify more than 2000 errors. We are further able to discover how error frequencies change with error depth, how they correlate with the size of the sub-processes and swim-lane interactions in the models, and how they can be predicted in terms of process metrics like sub-process size, coefficient of connectivity, sequentiality and structuredness.

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.

Business process modeling and management approaches are increasingly used and disclosed between organizations as a means of optimizing and streamlining the business activities. Among the various existing modeling languages, we stress the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), currently in version 2.0. BPMN is a widespread OMG standard that is actually used either in academia and in organizations. BPMN enables business process modeling, but does not facilitate the modeling of the information infrastructure involved in the process. However, interest in the data and its preservation has increased in BPMN's most recent version. The aim of this paper is to study BPMN 2.0, particularly on the usage and persistence of data, and present an approach for obtaining an early data model from the business process modeling, which may then be used as a starting data model in the software development process.

Modeling based on a graphical notation understandable for different specialists has become very popular. Within the area of business processes, the most common one is the Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN). BPMN is aimed at all business users who design, analyze, manage and monitor business processes. BPMN specification is relatively precise, but it provides a descriptive form presented at some abstract, graphical level. The main focus of this chapter is an attempt to present an overview of the anomalies which are likely to occur when modeling with use of BPMN.