Enhancing the Formal Foundations of BPMN by Enterprise Ontology

Abstract

Recently, business processes are receiving more attention as process-centric representations of an enterprise. This paper focuses on the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), that is becoming an industry standard. However, BPMN has some drawbacks such as the lack of formal semantics, limited potential for verification, and ambiguous description of the constructs. Also the ontology used to model is mostly kept implicit. As a result, BPMN models may be ambiguous, inconsistent or incomplete. In order to overcome these limitations, a contribution to BPMN is proposed by applying the way of thinking of DEMO; the explicit specified Enterprise ontology axioms and the rigid modeling methodology of DEMO. Adding the ontological concepts which, in DEMO, are translated into a coherent set of modeling symbols, may result in formal, unambiguous BPMN business process models. As such BPMN can be enriched on several aspects like the diagnosis, consistency, and optimalization of business processes.