Abstract
Business process modelling (BPM) notations, such as BPMN, UML-Activity Diagram (UML-AD), EPC and CMMN describe processes using a graphical representation of process-relevant entities and their interplay. Despite the wide literature on the comparison between different modelling languages, the BPM community still lacks an ontological characterisation of process elements, among which process participants, that is, the main entities involved in a business process. Purpose of this paper is to start filling this gap by providing an ontological analysis of business processes from the standpoint of process participants. In particular, by discussing participants common to languages such as BPMN, EPC, UML-AD, and CMMN we characterize them on the basis of their ontological properties.
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- 1.
Traditional process modelling notations rely on an imperative paradigm which aims at producing models that describe all allowed flows: every flow that is not specified in the model is implicitly disallowed. Recent declarative process modelling notations instead allow the production of more flexible models obtained by describing constraints on the allowed activity flows: all flows are allowed provided that they do not violate the specified constraints.
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- 3.
- 4.
The list of symbols of EPCs can vary, depending on the specific system implementation. The analysis and diagrams contained in this paper refer to the description provided in [20].
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- 6.
CMMN allows to associate organisational entities to cases during the run-time phase.
- 7.
‘Token’ is hereby synonym of a process occurrence (an instance of a process type). While a process token occurs at a specific time, a process type is an abstract entity with no specific temporal location (see the distinction between Activity (type) and ActivityOccurrence (token) in the Process Specification Language (PSL) [7]).
- 8.
As a matter of fact, a language like BPMN does not force modellers to explicitly represent what changes in the (local) world are expected after an activity is performed.
- 9.
‘Event’ is the most general term used in [2] for entities occurring in time.
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Acknowledgments
This research has been partially carried out within the Euregio IPN12 KAOS, which is funded by the “European Region Tyrol-South Tyrol-Trentino” (EGTC) under the first call for basic research projects.
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Adamo, G., Borgo, S., Di Francescomarino, C., Ghidini, C., Guarino, N., Sanfilippo, E.M. (2017). Business Processes and Their Participants: An Ontological Perspective. In: Esposito, F., Basili, R., Ferilli, S., Lisi, F. (eds) AI*IA 2017 Advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI*IA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10640. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70169-1_16
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