Deriving complex structured object types for business process modelling

Abstract

To build efficient information systems it is important to understand and to optimize the business processes which should be supported. INCOME/STAR is an integrated environment for the cooperative development of large, distributed information systems. INCOME/STAR supports the conceptual modelling of structural system aspects by the entity relationship model and of dynamic system aspects by high level Petri nets. This combination provides a powerful concept for the integrated modelling of business processes. The behaviour of the complex object types within business processes can be described by a new variant of Petri nets, so-called Nested Relation/Transition- Nets. In this paper we suggest a new concept for the derivation of complex structured object types to be used for business process modelling. Complex object types can be interpreted as views on a given global entity relationship scheme. We give rules how to derive such complex object types from the global scheme and represent them as object types in a semantic hierarchy model as well as in an extended ER model.