From Business Process Modeling to Data Model: A Systematic Approach

Abstract

Business process modeling and management approaches are increasingly used and disclosed between organizations as a means of optimizing and streamlining the business activities. Among the various existing modeling languages, we stress the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), currently in version 2.0. BPMN is a widespread OMG standard that is actually used either in academia and in organizations. BPMN enables business process modeling, but does not facilitate the modeling of the information infrastructure involved in the process. However, interest in the data and its preservation has increased in BPMN's most recent version.The aim of this paper is to study BPMN 2.0, particularly on the usage and persistence of data, and present an approach for obtaining an early data model from the business process modeling, which may then be used as a starting data model in the software development process.

Deriving a Data Model from a Set of Interrelated Business Process Models

“…The approach presented herein extends and completes the approach presented in (Cruz et al, 2012) allowing the aggregation of the existing information spanning several related business process models into one data model. The proposed approach allows identifying the entities involved, the corresponding attributes and the relations (including cardinality and optionality) between the entities.…”

“…In this paper we present an approach to extract the existing information about data (focusing our attention in persistent data) from a set of interrelated business process models and create a data model that can be used as a basis for developing a supporting software system. An approach to obtain the data model based on a single BPMN private business process model has already been presented, by the same authors (Cruz et al, 2012). The presented approach allows obtaining an initial data model that can serve as a basis for further development.…”

“…However, a software application usually supports more than one single business process. Consequently, the approach presented in (Cruz et al, 2012) could not integrate in one data model all the data involved in all business processes that must be supported by the software under development.…”

Automated two-phase business model-driven synthesis of conceptual database models

“…A MDSDM based on BPMN is also considered in [65,48,30], but without implementation. The formal rules for automatic CDM synthesis based on BPMN are presented in [21,56], and partially in [26,27]. Other papers consider only the guidelines that do not enable automatic synthesis.…”

Modelling the business structure of a digital health ecosystem

“…Yet, before exploring the different ecosystem's exploitation alternatives, it turns out necessary to clearly define the ecosystem's business structure. Moreover, to obtain a successful business model that suits a software-based ecosystem, the business structure should P O S T be included as an additional data model in the software development process [8] [9]. To do so, the present paper employs the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), which is a standardized graphical representation for specifying business processes within a business process model.…”