Database Reference
In-Depth Information
8.1 Business Process Modeling Notation
A business process is a collection of related activities or tasks in an
organization whose goal is to produce a specific service or product. A
task can be performed by software systems, humans, or a combination of
these. Business process modeling is the activity of representing the business
processes of an organization so that the current processes may be analyzed
and improved.
Many techniques to model business processes have been proposed over the
years. Traditional techniques include Gantt charts, flowcharts, PERT dia-
grams, and data flow diagrams. However, the problem with these techniques
is the lack of a formal semantics. On the other hand, formal techniques such
as Petri Nets have a well-defined semantics but are dicult to understand
by business users and, in addition, do not have the expressiveness to
represent some typical situations that arise in real-world settings. Many
efforts were carried out since the 1990s in the area of workflow management
systems to define languages and tools for modeling and executing business
processes. A standardization process resulted in BPMN released by the
Object Management Group (OMG). The current version of the standard
is BPMN 2.0.
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BPMN provides a graphical notation for defining and understanding the
business processes of an organization and to communicate them in a standard
manner. The rationale behind BPMN is to define a language that is usable
by the business community, is constrained to support the modeling concepts
that are applicable to business processes, and is useful in clearly describing
complex processes. BPMN is defined using the Unified Modeling Language
(UML). In addition, a precise semantics of the language and an execution
semantics are also defined.
BPMN aims at tackling two conflicting requirements, namely, providing
a simple mechanism for creating business process models and handling
the complexity inherent to them. The approach taken to tackle these two
requirements was to organize the graphical aspects of the notation into
categories, so that the reader of a BPMN diagram can easily recognize
the basic types of elements and understand the diagram. Within the basic
categories of elements, additional variation and information can be added
to support the requirements for complexity without dramatically changing
the basic look and feel of the diagram. There are four basic categories of
elements, namely, flow objects, connecting objects, swimlanes, and artifacts.
Flow objects
are the main elements for defining a business process. There
are three types of flow objects: activities, gateways, and events. An
activity
is a work performed during a process. Activities can be either single tasks
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