The Business Process Modeling Notation

Abstract

Business processes may be analyzed and designed at different levels of abstraction. In this respect, it is common to distinguish between business process models intended for business analysis and improvement, and those intended for automation by means, for example, of a workflow engine such as YAWL. At the business analysis level, stakeholders focus on strategic and tactical issues such as cost, risks, resource utilization, and other nonfunctional aspects of process models. At the automation level, stakeholders are interested in making their models executable, which entails the need to provide detailed specifications of data types, data extraction and conversion steps, application bindings, resource allocation, and distribution policies, among others. The requirements for process modeling notations at these two levels of abstraction are significantly different. This in turn has resulted in different languages being advocated at the business analysis level and at the execution level. Common languages used at the business analysis level include flowcharts, UML activity diagrams, the Business ProcessModeling Notation (BPMN), and Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs). In this chapter, we consider BPMN, and specifically, version 1.0 of the BPMN standard specification. In general, the main purpose of BPMN models is to facilitate communication between domain analysts and to support decision-making based on techniques such as cost analysis, scenario analysis, and simulation. However, BPMN models are also used as a basis for specifying software system requirements, and in such cases, they are handed over to software developers. This handover raises the following question: How can developers fully exploit BPMN process models produced by domain analysts?