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An Ontological Analysis of Business Process Modeling and Execution

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An Ontological Analysis of Business Process Modeling and Execution 1 An Ontological Analysis of Business Process Modeling and Execution Robert Singer FH JOANNEUM – University of Applied Sciences Dep. of Applied Computer Sciences Alte Poststraße 147 8020 Graz, Austria [email protected] F Abstract—This work presents a fully elaborated ontology, defined via investigate structural properties of business processes and the Ontology Web Language (OWL), of the Business Process Model and the software community which is interested in providing Notation (BPMN) standard to define business process models, and we robust and scalable software systems to support the execu- demonstrate that any BPMN model can be serialized as OWL file. Based tion of business processes [1]. on ontological analysis and a corresponding definition of a modeling no- tation as ontology we show that business process models can be trans- formed from one notation into another one as long as there are common 2 MOTIVATION AND DEFINITIONS underlying concepts; this is demonstrated with the case of an actor For a common understanding, it is worth to give definitions based, or subject-oriented, view on business processes. Furthermore, a reference architecture for Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) of the most important concepts used in this work. First, based on microservices is discussed which is capable of executing actor we define the notion of business process, and afterward the based business process models. As a transformation of BPMN models term business process management. into the actor based view is generally possible, also BPMN models could An elaborated definition of the notion of business pro- be enacted. As a result, we can conclude that the actor system is a cess is as follows: promising way to stimulate new ways to design workflow management A business process is a network of connected activities systems and to design business process modeling languages which (tasks), which are conducted by actors (humans or systems) are more comfortable to use by non-experts without losing necessary in logical and temporal order with the help of tools (devices, expressiveness. Another result is that an ontology is a productive way software). The activities are executed on business objects to define a modeling notation as it can be used as knowledge base, it is a formal conceptualization of the underlying notions, and can be (data or physical objects) to satisfy a customer requirement, semantically enriched for further use. and the business process has a defined beginning and input, and a defined end and a result (output). Furthermore, a Index Terms—BPM, BPMN, S-BPM, actor, ontology, modeling, work- business process is executed in a technical, organizational, flow, architecture and a social context. Such a typical definition defines the architectural el- ements, or entities, which constitute a business process: arXiv:1905.00499v1 [cs.SE] 18 Apr 2019 1 INTRODUCTION activity, resource or actor, business object, customer, input, Business process management (BPM) is a well-known con- and output. That means a business process defines what is cept known by management as well as experts of the in- done (in logical order) and who is doing what. formation technology (IT) community. As already stated by A common definition [6] of the term business process Weske [1], members of these groups have different educa- management is as follows: tional backgrounds and interests. Business process management (BPM) is a manage- From a systems theoretical point of view, business pro- ment discipline that integrates the strategy and cess management constitutes a subsystem of the manage- goals of an organization with the expectations and ment system of a company, and it is a means to operational- needs of customers by focusing on end-to-end pro- ize the business strategy. If the BPM subsystem works as cesses. BPM comprises strategies, goals, culture, or- intended, it is a management tool to steer the performance ganizational structures, roles, policies, methodolo- of the company. A detailed discussion of a systems view and gies, and IT tools to (a) analyze, design, implement, the corresponding tools can be found, for example, in [2], [3], control, and continuously improve end-to-end pro- and [4], which is based on pioneer work of [5], for example. cesses, and (b) to establish process governance. In computer sciences, there are further interest groups, Business process management is based on a closed life- such as researchers with a background in formal methods to cycle with typically four main phases. First, a business pro- 2 cess has to be defined, then it has to be implemented, then • H5: WfMS have a typical architecture, independent it is executed, and finally, it has to be evaluated according of the modeling notation so that it is possible to to effectivity and efficiency. The life cycle is closed such that execute a transformed BPMN model on an S-BPM after evaluation a process is eventually redesigned to reflect WfMS. the results from the evaluation phase. The BPM-System (the corresponding management system) ensures that each business process follows this life-cycle so that there is an 3 THE NOTION OF SYSTEM MODEL implicit improvement circle. For the following section, we provide some fundamental Each phase has its challenges. In this work, we will concepts about modeling in general and modeling in the focus on the modeling and the execution phase. Business domain of computer sciences or information technology (IT) processes can be executed with or without the support of in particular as a foundation for further discussions later in software systems. We will discuss the relationship between this work. Mainly we want to point out, that a model has a these phases and the consequences of particular design and specific purpose (a selected view on reality) and involves technology decisions. This discussion will lead to insights some subjective aspects too. Furthermore, it is generally about business process modeling notations and about the accepted that the organization of a company constitutes a design and architecture of supporting software systems, complex system (see Figure 1). Modeling must be thought often named as workflow management systems (WfMS). with this in mind. The analysis will be done based on an ontological analysis in several ways. First, we will do an ontological analysis to understand the core concepts of the notion of business process in general. Then we will discuss the use of ontologies to define business process models; for this purpose, an ontology of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), the industry standard modeling notation, has been developed. The ontology is modeled in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and a software application has been developed to store any BPMN-XML as OWL model. Then we will discuss the capabilities of BPMN to de- fine process choreographies (named as collaboration in the BPMN standard document) which are executable by a soft- ware system. This analysis will be based on a comparison with the well-known actor system concept. A business pro- cess modeling language based on the actor system is the so- Fig. 1. Concept map: complex system. called Subject-oriented Business Process Modelling (S-BPM) notation, which has been defined via an OWL ontology. The nature of any model is that it has a purpose; there- 3.1 Meaning of a Model fore it is irrelevant which modeling language is used for the If we want to model a world, we have to understand the model as long as it fits for the intendet purpose. Neverthe- so-called meaning triangle [7] [8] from semiotics as shown less, the design of a modeling notation has consequences for in Figure 2. the architecture of the supporting information technology as will be discussed in the case of WfMS. Furthermore, we will Concept Conceptualization discuss some technical requirements for a modern WfMS subjective to support business process networks, that means loosely coupled business processes. Interacting companies (buyer abstracts abstracts and seller, for erxample) realize loosely coupled business represents represents processes via communication between each process par- objective ticipant (named as choreography or collaboration in the stands for refers to domain of BPM). Symbol Thing Language Reality We can summarize the research questions in the follow- Fig. 2. Left: the meaning triangle for an individual; Right: the meaning ing way formulating some hypotheses: triangle for a specific reality domain (adapted from [9] [10]) • H1: it is possible to develop a BPMN ontology. A symbol or sign is an object that is used as a repre- • H2: it is possible to convert a BPMN model to OWL sentation of something else, and it is used to communicate and back again without loss of information. the concepts in our mind. A thing or object is an observ- • H3: it is possible to convert a BPMN model to an S- able and identifiable individual thing; objects are concrete BPM model—based on an ontological fit of the two or abstract. A concept is a subjective individual thing (a notations—and vice versa. thought in our mind). For a given domain, the set of all the • H4: an actor based modeling notation for business individual concepts abstracted from that domain is called processes (as S-BPM) is a natural candidate to design the conceptualization and to communicate the concepts we a modern architecture of workflow engines. need a language. 3 Furthermore, we have to introduce the notion of a of a cognitive model needs a language: the cognitive model system as an organization can only be understood as a abstracts information from the system under study, and this system. Therefore, any model is a model of a system. As is then represented in the communicated model by using discussed, models have a purpose and have a restricted symbols from some chosen (modeling) language. view on reality; for example, an organizational chart and The relation between subjective and objective is not a business process model are static and dynamic views on reflected in much of the software engineering literature the system of interest, respectively.
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