Towards a formal framework for reuse in business process modeling

Abstract

Business process models are created by business users with an objective to capture business requirements, enable a better understanding of business processes, facilitate communication between business analysts and IT experts, identify process improvement options and serve as a basis for derivation of executable business processes. Designing a new process model is a highly complex, time consuming and error prone task. In order to address this problem, we propose an approach to business process modeling through reuse of existing business process artifacts - process fragments. In addition, we provide a rich formalism for business process description based on π-calculus and ontologies as a basis of the approach. The formalism integrates different workflow perspectives and thus exposes the complete process model description to expressive querying and reasoning. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.