Toward a Time-centric modeling of Business Processes in BPMN 2.0

Abstract

Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce market is expected to expand rapidly in coming years. In this context, organizations tend to rely more on business process management (BPM) to streamline their operations. The business process field is influenced by a wide range of temporal constraints which rise from legal, regulatory, and managerial rules. One of the most promising standards for business process modeling, namely the Business process Model and notation BPMN poorly addresses the time dimension so far. In this paper, we elaborate an extension to BPMN 2.0 to handle the time dimension. The aim of this BPMN extensions is to support business analysts and modellers in easily including the needed temporal constraints in their processes. We motivate and justify our proposed extensions by means of illustrative case studies. Furthermore, based on the proposed extensions, a verification approach based on the model checking technique is used to diagnose potential temporal violations of the process model. The work presented in this paper sets foundation for later automation of these constraints through process execution engines.

A metamodel to integrate business processes time perspective in BPMN 2.0

“…Lanz et al [61] propose a set of time-patterns for processaware information systems (PAIS) [33,41] . Finally, there is a subgroup that trust BPMN as a pillar for time extensions, such as Cheikhrouhou et al [8] , Flores and Sepúlveda [15] , Gagné and Trudel [16][17][18] and Watahiki et al [35] . (ii) Some of the latter, who verify time constraints in processes, use UPPAAL integrated tool environment for carrying out validation and verification of real-time systems modeled as timed automata networks, extended with data types (bounded integers and arrays, among others), such as Watahiki et al [35] , Du et al [10] and Cheikhrouhou et al [6,7] .…”

“…We focus on activities in the business process field that run in the same organization. Therefore, we firstly exclude some time rules, like IOBPs [5,8] , that could be included in future work. An activity may be a single task, a process or a subprocess , but, in general, it must have fixed or flexible duration.…”

“…In contrast, works extending BPMN 2.0 with decorators to introduce time dimension, like Time-BPMN by Gagné and Trudel [18] and, among others, some extensions like those included in the work by Cheikhrouhou et al [8] . Both of them give very good comprehensibility specifications, although we should wait until BPMN will be able to have this semantics.…”

“…We can also expand the metamodel scope to incorporate more complex time rules: for example, for collaborative processes (IOBP) [5,8] .…”

“…Researchers have defined business process time dimension with different approaches, such as Timed Automata [6,7,35] , Time Petri Nets [19,23,24] , Time workflow nets [10] , Timed activity graphs [12,13] , BPMN [8,[15][16][17][18]35] and other different techniques [20,21,37] .…”