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BPeX: Business Process eXtensions

The increased interest around business processes management and modeling techniques has brought many organizations to make significant investments in business process modeling projects. One of the most recent proposal for a new business process modeling technique is Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN).

Figure 1: BPMN schematic metamodel
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Figure 1: BPMN schematic metamodel

Around BPMN has grown a huge amount of standards and notations, like BPEL, XPDL, BPML, BPSS. Unfortunately, no one of these formalisms can represent adequately all the main aspects of BPMN, causing companies and PAs to choice which feature they prefer to underline and, thus, which standard they prefer to use. On one side there is the growth of BPMN as a de-facto standard to represent business processes, on the other side the interoperability and the portability of the diagrams representing business processes is actually far from being a common practice.

Figure 2: The new BPeX schematic Model
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Figure 2: The new BPeX schematic Model

Towards this end, we introduce a new meta model for BPMN and a corresponding XML-based representation (called BPeX) which we employ in order to write methodologies to model, analyze, execute, evaluate processes. We started developing a syntax-aided BPMN Processes Editor based on the BPeX meta model and its XML-Schema representation. Using BPeX we plan to enrich BPMN with some helpful features like metrics or privacy policies.

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Problems and goals

Figure 3: The new BPeX UML Conceptual Model
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Figure 3: The new BPeX UML Conceptual Model

There are almost no methodologies at all to model, analyze, evaluate and re-engineer modeled processes. There are some work on comparing different notations and standards: workflow nets and BPEL, BPMN and BPEL, BPEL and XPDL. BPMN specifications talk about BPEL(4WS) as the more compatible and standard translation in an execution XML-based language for Web-Services, even if BPEL is less expressive than BPMN and thus can not translate the whole BPMN diagram models. Besides BPEL, there is also the XPDL standard notation that can represent the whole BPMN elements set and their graphical views. To our best knowledge, all the efforts to define a complete serialization for BPM move from the standards already published, e.g., BPEL and XPDL.

There is a lack of a complete serialization, which is partially due to the BPMN metamodel which is inadequate and not much clearly stated. The example of Fig. 1 illustrates the metamodel of BPMN as it can be inferred from the specifications. We mark elements with no graphical representation (excepting from the root) with white text and grey background, dividing also flows representation elements from Activities, Events and Gateways.

BPMN provides a strict hierarchical representation just between 4 elements, leaving the other elements being referenced by IDRef attributes (the dashed arrows). Every Activity, Gateway or Event maintains two references towards their container elements and the Process element has a list of references to all the elements which are parts of it. This structure has been reproduced also in the 2nd version of XPDL. Flows are independent from any other element.

Up to now, there are not methodologies related to BPMN modeling, analysis or evaluation, although this is a very important topic. There would be some rules to aid modelers to represent business processes correctly. Furthermore, there is the need of algorithms to check if a model is compliant to the BPMN specifications or to analyze if a process can be redrawn in a simpler but equivalent way. Without a complete mapping between BPMN and its serialized format it is very hard to define such a methodologies.


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ChangeLog

23.05.2008: New changes done

  • You can see the detailed list of all the changes we made by clicking here


22.05.2008: New contents arriving

  • We are changing some contents, deleting old articles and adding new ones. In about one week the site will be updated. Stay tuned!

03.01.2008: Under construction

  • These pages are under construction. There will be new contents in a couple of days.

28.06.2007: Today Changes:

27.06.2007: Today Changes:

  • New blog starts! It is reachable HERE
  • A new version of the editor is quite finished. This version is based on our data model. We have fixed some relevant bugs on flows.
23.06.2007: Today Changes:

12.06.2007: Today Changes:

24.04.2007: Today Changes:

20.04.2007: Today Changes:

19.04.2007: Added new pages:

Added new content in Screenshots and thesis pages

16.04.2007: Added new content in papers and thesis sections

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