Pavel Balabko

Context based reasoning in business process models

Modeling approaches often are not adapted to human reasoning: models are ambiguous and imprecise. A same model element may have multiple meanings in different functional roles of a system. Existing modeling approaches do not relate explicitly these functional roles with model elements. A principle that can solve this problem is that model elements should be defined in a context. We believe that the explicit modeling of context is especially useful in business process modeling (BPM) where the meaning of any model element should be defined precisely. The contribution of our work is at the context-aware modeling framework for BPM. We model a system as the composition of small roles, where each role of a system is defined in its own context.

Capturing design rationale with functional decomposition of roles in business processes modeling

Enterprises need to create and maintain the fit between their business processes and their business process support (BPS) systems. This frequently requires re-engineering of business processes. If the business processes design ration-ales are made explicit, the re-engineering of the existing business processes is easier. Making the design rationales ex-plicit is useful to understand why things exist as they are, and to understand if and how they can be changed. The most common way to capture design rationales is to list the design decisions underlying the business process. In the method proposed in this publication, we capture design rationales through role modeling. We document the design rationales for each role in the analyzed business process. The roles are described as the compositions of base func-tionalities. A base functionality is the specification of a role (or of a part of a role) from the viewpoint of one of the specific specialists who design the business process. These base functionalities are composed together to describe the roles of the participants to the business process. As a result, a business process modeler can understand who is respon-sible of what in the business processes. In collaboration with the specialists, the business modeler can then ensure that no important part of the business process is missing or is unnecessary. Thanks to this work, the business process can be verified before being automated with the BPS system.

From RM-ODP to the Formal Behavior Representation

In this work we consider the behavioral aspects of system modeling. In order to specify the behavior of a system, many different notations can be used. Quite often different terms in these notations are related with to same element in a system implementation. In order to relate these terms and guarantee the consistency between different notations some standard can be used. In this work we show how the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) can be used for the purpose of the mapping of terms from different behavioral notations. In particular, we show the correspondence between terms in UML activity diagrams, UML state diagrams and Finite State Automata by means of relating them with RM-ODP terms. This allows us to consider RM-ODP as a possible meta-model for behavior specifications written in UML, which help to insure the consistency of UML models.