Abstract-A business process is the combination of a set of activities with logical order and dependence, whose objective is to produce a desired goal. Business process modeling (BPM) using knowledge of the available process modeling techniques enables a common understanding and analysis of a business process. Industry and academics use informal and formal techniques respectively to represent business processes (BP), having the main objective to support an organization. Despite both are aiming at BPM, the techniques used are quite different in their semantics. While carrying out literature research, it has been found that there is no general representation of business process modeling is available that is expressive than the commercial modeling tools and techniques. Therefore, it is primarily conceived to provide an ontology mapping of modeling terms of Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), Unified Modeling Language (UML) Activity Diagrams (AD) and Event Driven Process Chains (EPC) to temporal logic. Being a formal system, first order logic assists in thorough understanding of process modeling and its application. However, our contribution is to devise a versatile conceptual categorization of modeling terms/constructs and also formalizing them, based on well accepted business notions, such as action, event, process, connector and flow. It is demonstrated that the new categorization of modeling terms mapped to formal temporal logic, provides the expressive power to subsume business process modeling techniques i.e. BPMN, UML AD and EPC.
IT industry has adopted unified modeling language activity diagram (UML-AD) as a de facto standard. UML AD facilitates modelers to graphically represent and document business processes to show the flow of activities and behavior of a system. However, UML AD has many drawbacks such as lack of formal semantics i.e. ontology used for the constructs based on intuition, that vaguely describes processes and no provision for verifiability. Petri Net (PN) has been around for decades and used to model the workflow systems but PNs and its variants are too complex for business process modelers with no prior experience. A logical foundation is desirable to construct a business process with a precision that facilitates in transforming UML AD into a formal mechanism supported by verifiability capabilities for enhanced reasoning. Therefore, in this paper, we will provide a framework that will provide formal definitions for UML AD core terms and constructs used for modeling, and subsequently transform them to formal representation called point graph(PG). This will provide an insight into UML AD and will improve the overall functionality required from a modeling tool. A case study is conducted at King's College Hospital trust' to improve their patient flows of an accident and emergency (A&E) department.
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