Semantic business process modelling and analysis

Abstract

The objective of this chapter is to describe and evaluate an approach for the automated analysis of business process models. Business process models have become a valuable tool for decision makers. To be helpful in decision making the information in the process models has to be prepared for a managerial target group. Modeling of business process landscapes leads to a huge set of data about an organization. To extract the decision relevant information from this fact base can be supported by automated analysis mechanisms. However, the automated analysis of business process models is a complex task due to challenges of processing natural language statements as part of the models. In the chapter we introduce a class of process modeling languages, the semantic building block-based languages that enable an automated analysis of their resulting models. Based on a comprehensive literature study, we identified different deviations and conflicts that usually arise in business process modeling projects. We show that semantic building block-based languages can help avoiding these conflicts. Based on the domain-specific language PICTURE we demonstrate with a case study that building block-based languages can be used for automated process analysis in practical project settings.