Deontic BPMN

Abstract

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is maintained by the Object Management Group (OMG) and a widely-used standard for process modeling. A drawback of BPMN, however, is that modality is implicitly expressed through the structure of the process flow. All activities are implicitly mandatory and whenever something should be optional, a gateway or event is used to split the process flow and offer the possibility to execute the task or to do nothing. This requires a comprehensive understanding of the whole process to identify mandatory, optional and alternative activities. The paper addresses this issue and extends BPMN with deontic logic to explicitly highlight modality. After a detailed study of modality expressed through various BPMN elements, an approach based on path exploration is introduced to support the deontic analysis. The result is an algebraic graph transformation from BPMN to Deontic BPMN diagrams, reducing the structural complexity and allowing better readability by explicitly highlighting the deontic classification. The understandability of Deontic BPMN is studied by means of a preliminary survey. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.