1. Business Process Modeling Workflow Patterns Ang Chen July 8, 2005

2. Plan Introdution BPM: State of The Art Reference Model Properties of Business Processes Workflow Patterns COOPN Approach Further investigations

4. State of The Art Business Process Engineering Modeling, Analysis, Simulation, Re-Engineering Process Enactment: BPM systems Models Event-Driven Process Chains (EPCs), Petri Nets Based, UML, Service Oriented, Business Rules … Standards Workflow Management Coalition: Reference Model, XPDL Business Process Execution Language(BPEL) etc. Research Most formalisms are Petri Nets based, Wil van der Aalast … Various topics: management, process re-engineering, process mining …

5. WfMC: Reference Model

6. Properties of Business Processes The requirements are wide-ranging, often unclear, and changing Difficult to find an universal model Patterns provide flexible solutions Process is abstract and inter-organizational Execution needs cross-systems support and cooperation between existing systems Web Service may help for interoperability

7. Workflow Patterns Proposed by Wil van der Aalast Perspectives Control flow: process management Data flow: information flow Operational: interactions between systems Resources: humans, machines etc. We continue with control flow

8. Control flow patterns Basic constructs AND, OR, JOIN, SPLIT Synchronization and Merge Cycle and termination Multi-Instances Cancellation

10. COOPN approach Patterns need precise semantic Process Definition Languages need Formal foundation No ambiguity, process verification Rich expressiveness power Requirements are wide-ranged To represent all possible situations Our Propositions Use COOPN for workflow model, patterns Separate Control from other perspectives Process prototyping and integration

11. Example of an activity Case -> ADT, defined as a pair: ID is the process instance identification LocalState is the local instance representation in activities Activity -> COOPN class or context Process -> COOPN context

12. Basic Principe Using simple ADT to represent process instances Define partial ordered algebra for particular business process, like “chemical reaction” or functional programming, e.g. “H+H+O=water” Process controllers use ADTs of the algebra as internal data: “abstract state machine” in reality Process controller prototypes can be generated from COOPN Prototypes can be integrated into enactment systems to control processes The enactment system delegates activities to other systems and inform the process controller

14. Further Investigations Process Prototyping & Integration Transformation between COOPN and other process definition languages, e.g. BPEL Adding ADTs to represent Data and other flows Process verification Methodologies for Business Process Modeling