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).[3] 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, retrieved jan 6 2009).”

See also: The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), an executable XML language. Most (?) BPMN tools can compile drawings into executable BPEL and other XML formats in addition.

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

The BPMN language

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

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.

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)
  • BPMN plugin for Eclipse
  • 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
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

Bibliography

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