Transforming BPMN 2.0 Business Process Model into SBVR Business Vocabulary and Rules

Abstract

As the success of information system projects and their development also relies on the knowledge of domain experts, the modelled processes should be presented to them for validation purposes before the implementation stage. Domain experts do not have the knowledge of business process modelling notations. Therefore, the validation may not be correct. However, they better understand structured natural language, such as SBVR that defines the meaning of business concepts and make them unambiguously understandable by human experts and also by software systems. The solution presented in this paper allows transforming BPMN 2.0 business process models into SBVR business vocabularies and business rules. This solution is implemented as a plug-in and is available in the MagicDraw CASE tool. An experimental evaluation of the proposed solution with three domain areas proved that SBVR business vocabulary and business rules could be fully obtained from BPMN 2.0 business process model when certain requirements for BPMN 2.0 business process model are met. The advantages of the solution are an automatic transformation for various BPMN modelling situations, tracing links between two models in one modelling environment and avoidance of necessity to use linguistic techniques.

Identifying Key Characteristics of Business Rules That Affect Software Project Success

“…The necessity to define a BR set specifically for a particular project (RQ2) originates from the fact that projects vary in size, price, number of developers, complexity, number of development teams [47], and other unique characteristics [48]. The definition of BR and especially business terms must be understandable to business users (e.g., using SBVR [9,25]) and developers (e.g., platform-specific BR, like Ilog, Bonita, etc.). BR should be specifically prepared for a particular project [4,12].…”

“…Authors found that BR defined in a written form significantly positively affect software implementation projects success since creating an SBVR model before the software implementation stage facilitates software development, maintenance and evolution [25,26], and helps in the assistance of business [27].…”

On the design of an advanced business rule engine

“…Saruwatari et al, 33 highlighted the difficulty to extract business rules from general purpose programming languages and suggested to analyze the execution logs instead. Other authors have put an emphasis on high‐level specification languages, namely: Deesukying and Vatanawood 34 worked in the context of Petri Nets, Skersys et al 35 and Danenas et al 36 focused on UML, and Mickeviciute et al 37 and Al‐Ali et al 38 specialized in BPMN. The work by Karaa et al 39 is interesting in the context of UML since it presented an improved approach to transform business rules from natural language that are specified within a user's requirements document into an UML class diagram, automatically.…”

Modeling Business Rule Parallelism by Introducing Inclusive and Complex Gateways in Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules

“…E. Mickeviciute, R. Butleris, S. Gudas, and E. Karciauskas [20] compared four solutions to transform BPMN into SBVR using 11 criteria. The purpose of this study was to determine business vocabulary and business rules in the form of SBVR obtained from a process model used for validation purposes by domain experts.…”