Reverse Engineering of Enterprise Business Processes - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 101

since 2005. The current version of BPMN is 1.2,
while there are still in progress a major revision
process for BPMN 2.0.
Each model, in order to be well defined and
comprehensive by all parts should respect some
constraints and be conformed to a metamodel.
BPDM (Business Process Definition Metamodel)
is the metamodel for BPMN (a metamodel de-
scribes the rules, constraints and theories of a
model, in other words, a model should conform
to a metamodel). It is an UML profile includ-
ing BPMN notations (OMG, 2007). The large
vocabulary of BPMN makes BPDM supporting
a wide variety of business concepts. Moreover,
BPDM is considered as a generic metamodel for
business processes allowing interoperability of
different BPM languages and tools. It provides,
also, XML syntax to exchange business process
models. BPDM models can be transformed to
BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)
files.
The use of a metamodel in a modeling process
is important to identify the elements that must
be considered. The elements are grouped in a
definition given by Morley et al (2005) “A busi-
ness process is a set of activities undertaken for a
specific goal. The responsibility of execution of
the whole or some of activities by an actor cor-
responds to a role. The progress of the process
uses resources and is conditioned by internal
or external events”. Therefore, the processes of
different types (core, support or monitoring pro-
cesses) collaborate together to fulfill global goals
(WFMC, 1999) in agreement with the strategies
of the enterprise. Several works were interested
in integrating goals while modeling businesses.
In Samavi et al (2008), a framework is proposed
to facilitate the representation and analysis of
business models and their strategies. Jean (2000)
proposes an information system architecture iden-
tifying in a matrix the set of business processes
resulting from each strategic invariant. Other
works (Curtis et al, 1992; List & Korherr, 2006)
study business processes from different viewpoints

by proposing multi-view metamodels. Curtis et
al (1992) identifies 4 perspectives: functional,
behavioral, organizational and informational. List
and Korherr (2006) adds the contextual perspec-
tive consisting of goals of the enterprise and the
business processes and measures for these goals.
However, the metamodels proposed in (Morley
et al, 2005; Curtis et al, 1992; List & Korherr, 2006)
do not consider some business process concepts
and are not related to a modeling language in or-
der to be implemented. Our method uses BPDM
because of its advantages listed above. Besides,
BPDM presents some drawbacks preventing
its use as such. Consequently we propose some
modifications on BPDM resumed in three points:

• Removing details. BPDM consists of 4
packages and uses an UML infrastructure
consisting of 3 packages (OMG, 2007).
These packages include 161 interdepen-
dant classes. Most of the classes corre-
spond with particular notations of BPMN
or aim just to draw links with the UML in-
frastructure. Our goal is to propose a sim-
ple metamodel (i.e a reduced metamodel).
These classes and these links detrimental
for the generic nature of our method were
removed from the metamodel.
• Enriching the metamodel. BPDM does
not include some meta-information on the
process like its objective or its position in
the organization. While our method puts
forward the importance of considering
goals in the all modeling phases of business
process. Moreover, BPDM does not take
into account the different types of business
processes. Thus, we enriched BPDM with
classes in order to link the process with its
environment and the context in which it
operates.
• Using view mechanism. BPDM consists
of packages built to separate different lev-
els of abstraction or different semantics of
the classes. We used these packages to con-