From Process Models to Business Process Architectures: Connecting the Layers

Abstract

Business process management has become a standard commodity to manage and improve business operations in organisations. Large process model collections emerged. Managing, and maintaining them has become a major area of research. Business process architectures (BPAs) have been introduced to support this task focusing on interdependencies between processes. Both the process and BPA layer are often modeled independently, creating inconsistencies between both layers. However, a consistent overview on process interdependencies on BPA level is of high importance, especially in regard to assessing the impact of change when optimising business process collaborations. In this paper, we propose a formal approach to extract BPAs from process model collections connecting process layer and BPA layer for assuring consistency between them. Interdependencies between process models will be reflected in trigger and message flows on BPA level giving a high level overview of process collaboration as well as allowing its formal verification with existing approaches. We will show the extraction of BPAs from process model collections on a running example modeled in BPMN.