Translating standard process models to BPEL

Standardisation of languages in the field of business process management has long been an elusive goal. Recently though, consensus has built around one process implementation language, namely BPEL, and two fundamentally similar process modelling notations, namely UML Activity Diagram (UML AD) and BPMN. This paper presents a technique for generating BPEL code from process models expressed in a core subset of BPMN and UML AD. This model-to-code translation is a necessary ingredient to the emergence of model-driven business process development environments based on these standards. The proposed translation has been implemented as an open source tool

Translating semantic web service based business process models

We describe a model-driven translation approach between Semantic Web Service based business process models in the context of the SUPER project. In SUPER we provide a set of business process ontologies for enabling access to the business process space inside the organisation at the semantic level. One major task in this context is to handle the translations between the provided ontologies in order to navigate from different views at the business level to the IT view at the execution level. In this paper we present the results of our translation approach, which transforms instances of BPMO to instances of sBPEL

Declarative process modeling in BPMN

Traditional business process modeling notations, including the standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), rely on an imperative paradigm wherein the process model captures all allowed activity flows. In other words, every flow that is not specified is implicitly disallowed. In the past decade, several researchers have exposed the limitations of this paradigm in the context of business processes with high variability. As an alternative, declarative process modeling notations have been proposed (e.g., Declare). These notations allow modelers to capture constraints on the allowed activity flows, meaning that all flows are allowed provided that they do not violate the specified constraints. Recently, it has been recognized that the boundary between imperative and declarative process modeling is not crisp. Instead, mixtures of declarative and imperative process modeling styles are sometimes preferable, leading to proposals for hybrid process modeling notations. These developments raise the question of whether completely new notations are needed to support hybrid process modeling. This paper answers this question negatively. The paper presents a conservative extension of BPMN for declarative process modeling, namely BPMN-D, and shows that Declare models can be transformed into readable BPMN-D models. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Towards Consistency Management for a Business-Driven Development of SOA

The usage of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) along with the Business Process Management has emerged as a valuable solution for the complex (business process driven) system engineering. With a Model Driven Engineering where the business process models drive the supporting service component architectures, less effort is gone into the Business/IT alignment during the initial development activities, and the IT developers can rapidly proceed with the SOA implementation. However, the difference between the design principles of the emerging domainspecific languages imposes serious challenges in the following re-design phases. Moreover, enabling evolutions on the business process models while keeping them synchronized with the underlying software architecture models is of high relevance to the key elements of any Business Driven Development (BDD). Given a business process update, this paper introduces an incremental model transformation approach that propagates this update to the related service component configurations. It, therefore, supports the change propagation among heterogenous domainspecific languages, e.g., the BPMN and the SCA. As a major contribution, our approach makes model transformation more tractable to reconfigure system architecture without disrupting its structural consistency. We propose a synchronizer that provides the BPMN-to-SCA model synchronization with the help of the conditional graph rewriting

Customizing BPMN Diagrams Using Timelines

BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) is widely used standard modeling technique for representing Business Processes by using diagrams, but lacks in some aspects. Representing execution-dependent and time-dependent decisions in BPMN Diagrams may be a daunting challenge [Carlo Combi et al., 2017]. In many cases such constraints are omitted in order to preserve the simplicity and the readability of the process model. However, for purposes such as compliance checking, process mining, and verification, formalizing such constraints could be very useful. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for annotating BPMN Diagrams with Temporal Synchronization Rules borrowed from the timeline-based planning field. We discuss the expressivity of the proposed approach and show that it is able to capture a lot of complex temporally-related constraints without affecting the structure of BPMN diagrams. Finally, we provide a mapping from annotated BPMN diagrams to timeline-based planning problems that allows one to take advantage of the last twenty years of theoretical and practical developments in the field

A GROOVE Solution for the BPMN to BPEL Model Transformation

In this paper we present a solution of a model transformation between two standard languages for business process modeling BPMN and BPEL, using the GROOVE tool set. GROOVE is a tool for graph transformations that uses directed, edge labelled simple graphs and the SPO approach [Ren04]. Given a graph grammar (G, P), composed of a start graph G and a set of production rules P, the tool allows to compute a labelled transition system (LTS) corresponding to all possible derivations in this grammar. The tool is freely available for download. The latest version and documentation can be found on the website http://sourceforge.net/projects/groove. The graph grammar presented here as well as detailed description of the sample realization to the case study is available in the attachment

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Process-Based Design and Integration of Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Abstract Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSNs) are distributed sensor and actuator networks that monitor and control real-world phenomena, enabling the integration of the physical with the virtual world. They are used in domains like building automation, control systems, remote healthcare, etc., which are all highly process-driven. Today, tools and insights of Business Process Modeling (BPM) are not used to model WSN logic, as BPM focuses mostly on the coordination of people and IT systems and neglects the integration of embedded IT. WSN development still requires significant special-purpose, low-level, and manual coding of process logic. By exploiting similarities between WSN applications and business processes, this work aims to create a holistic system enabling the modeling and execution of executable processes that integrate, coordinate, and control WSNs. Concretely, we present a WSNspecific extension for Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and a compiler that transforms the extended BPMN models into WSN-specific code to distribute process execution over both a WSN and a standard business process engine. The developed tool-chain allows modeling of an independent control loop for the WSN.