BPMN

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Draft

Introduction

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a workflow. BPMN was developed by Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) (Wikipedia).

“The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) specification provides a graphical notation for specifying business processes in a Business Process Diagram (BPD). The objective of BPMN is to support business process management for both technical users and business users by providing a notation that is intuitive to business users yet able to represent complex process semantics. The BPMN specification also provides a mapping between the graphics of the notation to the underlying constructs of execution languages, particularly BPEL4WS. (Business Process Modeling Notation, Wikipedia, retrieved jan 6 2009).”

“PEL is an XML-based language for describing a business process in which most of the tasks represent interactions between the process and external Web services. The BPEL process itself is represented as a Web service, and is realized by a BPEL engine which executes the process description. BPMN is a standard set of diagramming conventions for describing business processes. It is designed to visualize a rich set of process flow semantics within a process and the communication between independent processes. It is intended to support capture of sufficient detail to allow it to be the source of an executable process description. Since BPEL is currently considered the most important standard for execution languages, a translation to BPEL is specified in the BPMN standard. By design there are some limitations on the process topologies that can be described in BPEL, so it is possible to represent processes in BPMN that cannot be mapped to BPEL.” (FAQ, retrieved 16:14, 22 June 2010 (UTC))

See also: The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), an executable XML language for business processes. Most BPMN tools, in particular BPMN 2.0 versions, can compile drawings into executable BPEL and other XML formats in addition. It seems that while a BPEL process can be represented using BPMN, some BPMN models cannot be represented using BPEL.

History and versions

  • BPMN 2.0 RFP: Request for Proposals for version 2.0 of BPMN (2008,-)
  • BPMN 1.1: OMG Specification, February, 2008
  • BPMN 1.0: OMG Final Adopted Specification, February 6, 2006
  • BPMN 1.0: May 3, 2004 Draft Specification

BPMN version 1.x

According to Wikipedia, BPEL has four categories of elements:

Flow Objects
Events, Activities, Gateways
Connecting Objects
Sequence Flow, Message Flow, Association
Swimlanes
Pool, Lane
Artifacts (Artefacts)
Data Object, Group, Annotation

BPMN.org divides the BPMN 2.0 notation graphics in six categories:

  • Activities
  • Events
  • Gateways
  • Connections
  • Artifacts
  • Swimlanes

A more difficult meta-model (i.e. an inofficial UML class diagram of BPMN was published by WSPER ("whisper").

BPMN 1.0 Meta model. Source: WSPER

BPMN version 2.0

The new revision of BPMN, 2.0 has more than 50 symbols in its full set. In other words, it is a very complex language.

The core set of BPMN 2.0 also can be defined as the set of flow objects, connecting objects, swimlanes and artifacts.

Activities

An activity can be generically described as work that an organization performs.

Events

Events represent something that "happens" during the course of a business process. An event will affect the flow of a process. An event is usually triggered by a cause and it will have an impact (result).

There are three kinds of events:

  1. Start
  2. Intermediate
  3. End

Gateways

Gateways represent decisions, forking and joining of flows.

Conversations

Conversations define message exchanges

Choreographies

Choreographies represent sets of tasks performed by participants

Swimlanes

....

Data

....

Examples

BPMN discussion model. Source: Erik Wilde, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), Slides, UC Berkeley iSchool

Tools

There seem to exist some free tools (none tested so far)

Free (totally or somewhat)
  • Oryx, (Signavio) a project to create BPMN 2.0 diagrams, EPCs or Petri nets online. Free for academics.
  • OMII-BPEL, Modelling, monitoring, executing scientific workflows with BPEL
  • Jadex process. LGPL licence. “The Jadex Processes project provides modelling and execution facilities for workflows. Main focus is on graphical forms of process representation (e.g. the Business Process Modelling Notation - BPMN) and direct execution of modelled processes (i.e. without prior code generation).” ([1]). This is part of a larger project. Jadex is a Belief Desire Intention (BDI) reasoning engine that allows for programming intelligent software agents in XML and Java.
Free web tools
Commercial
  • Intalo BPM, includes the interesting Social BPM that combines the BPM design tool with a social portal building framework.

This list is by no means complete, see for the moment:

Bibliography and links

Links

Overviews
Standards
  • BPEL 2.0 (the principal format PBMN can export to)
Web sites
Posters
Introductions/tutorials

the BPM Modeler BizAgi] by Marcus Goetz, Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods University Karlsruhe (TH).

Bibliography

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