Generation of hierarchical business process models from attribute relationship diagrams

Abstract

Business Process models are mostly designed manually. However, they can be generated from other representations, especially from the system specification. Attribute-Relationship Diagrams (ARD) aim at capturing relations, especially dependency relation, between the attributes specified for a particular system. Originally, the ARD method was developed for prototyping rule bases in an iterative manner. We propose to apply this method to business processes. The paper examines the possibility of generating the rule-oriented BPMN model and enriching process models with rules from the ARD diagram. We describe a technique of automatic generation of a BPMN model with decision table schemes for business rule tasks and form attributes for user tasks from the ARD diagram. In our approach, processes and rules are generated simultaneously. Thanks to this, they are complementary and can be directly executed using our hybrid execution environment.