Tackling Dierent Business Process Perspectives

Business Process Management (BPM) has emerged as a discipline to design, control, analyze, and optimize business operations. Conceptual models lie at the core of BPM. In particular, business process models have been taken up by organizations as a means to describe the main activities that are performed to achieve a specific business goal. Process models generally cover different perspectives that underlie separate yet interrelated representations for analyzing and presenting process information. Being primarily driven by process improvement objectives, traditional business process modeling languages focus on capturing the control flow perspective of business processes, that is, the temporal and logical coordination of activities. Such approaches are usually characterized as \u201cactivity-centric\u201d. Nowadays, activity-centric process modeling languages, such as the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard, are still the most used in practice and benefit from industrial tool support. Nevertheless, evidence shows that such process modeling languages still lack of support for modeling non-control-flow perspectives, such as the temporal, informational, and decision perspectives, among others. This thesis centres on the BPMN standard and addresses the modeling the temporal, informational, and decision perspectives of process models, with particular attention to processes enacted in healthcare domains. Despite being partially interrelated, the main contributions of this thesis may be partitioned according to the modeling perspective they concern. The temporal perspective deals with the specification, management, and formal verification of temporal constraints. In this thesis, we address the specification and run-time management of temporal constraints in BPMN, by taking advantage of process modularity and of event handling mechanisms included in the standard. Then, we propose three different mappings from BPMN to formal models, to validate the behavior of the proposed process models and to check whether they are dynamically controllable. The informational perspective represents the information entities consumed, produced or manipulated by a process. This thesis focuses on the conceptual connection between processes and data, borrowing concepts from the database domain to enable the representation of which part of a database schema is accessed by a certain process activity. This novel conceptual view is then employed to detect potential data inconsistencies arising when the same data are accessed erroneously by different process activities. The decision perspective encompasses the modeling of the decision-making related to a process, considering where decisions are made in the process and how decision outcomes affect process execution. In this thesis, we investigate the use of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard in conjunction with BPMN starting from a pattern-based approach to ease the derivation of DMN decision models from the data represented in BPMN processes. Besides, we propose a methodology that focuses on the integrated use of BPMN and DMN for modeling decision-intensive care pathways in a real-world application domain

Towards a Methodology and a Tool for Modeling Clinical Pathways

AbstractNowadays hospitals face the problem of increasing quality and at the same time reducing costs of their services. Clinical pathways approach has established itself as an effective method of reorganization of medical practice in a process-oriented way. Since more than a decade, clinical pathways are being created and applied in hospitals in the USA, Australia, and European countries. Traditional text-based approach for documenting clinical pathways does not allow automatic analysis and makes the maintenance of the models inefficient. Recently, researchers started to apply generic modeling languages, such as UML activity diagrams, EPC or BPMN, as well as domain specific process modeling languages, in order to formalize the representation of clinical pathways. However, none of these languages sufficiently covers the requirements of clinical pathway models, and the choice of a suitable modeling technique remains a problem. In this paper, we propose a modeling methodology and a modeling tool for creating graphical semantically annotated models of clinical pathways. We take into account the characteristics and usage scenarios of clinical pathways and show, how the proposed approach addresses these requirements