DOUBLE-STATE BASED BUSINESS PROCESS DESCRIPTION MODEL AND ITS OPERATIONAL SEMANTICS

Abstract

With the rapid development of economic globalization and informationization, the Chinese e-government is still in its adolescence with a long way ahead. Based on some recent research in Guangdong province, we find that e-government affair systems play important roles therein and represent a certain kind of application called Form-centered Application Systems (FAS). After much investigation and analysis on e-government's background, daily routine and regulations, we summarize some rules and disciplines of its business process modeling, based on which we characterize requirements of FAS. Though currently many process modeling approaches or techniques have been proposed and widely used, they can not fully and easily meet the special needs. In this paper, we introduce a new business process model called Double-State Based Business Process Description Model (DSBPDM), which is composed of Business Process Model (BPM) and Dispatching Model (DM), where BPM enriches Finite State Machine (FSM) Model by three constraint checks, business logic and message passing, whereas DM delineates the dispatching and executing status of the business object in its lifetime. After presenting DSBPDM's formal definition, we discuss the essence of process forwarding by deducing its operational semantics formally. In this way, key issues such as explicit state and operation representation, rigorous constraint expression, complex authorization check, and full picture of the dispatching and executing of business objects are nicely tackled. Our practice shows that building FAS system with DSBPDM and its supporting platform fits the requirements well, provides an open and transparent view of business process, satisfies the needs of the public and officials, and helps to get a comprehensive insight into the meaning of business process forwarding.