Nicola Guarino

Business Processes and Their Participants: An Ontological Perspective

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.

Business Process Activity Relationships: Is There Anything Beyond Arrows?

Business process modelling languages enable the depiction of the processes of an organisation by exploiting graphical symbols to denote the key elements to be represented. Despite the variety of approaches, graphical symbols, and (in)formal interpretations associated to the different languages, a fundamental component of every business process modelling language is the representation of the way activities are related by means of control arcs and gateways. While multiple kinds of relationships may hold among such activities, mainstream business process modelling languages seem actually only interested in modelling a single (very important) kind of relationship, namely the activity execution order within the control flow. In this paper we investigate the role of another kind of fundamental relationship between activities, namely ontological dependence, in the context of business process modelling. In particular, we introduce three forms of generic ontological dependence, namely historical dependence, causal dependence, and goal-based co-occurrence. We illustrate different forms in which they can occur, we introduce a language to express them and we discuss their usefulness in two concrete use cases.