Robert Singer

Robert Singer

This work presents a fully elaborated ontology, defined via the Ontology Web Language (OWL), of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard to define business process models, and we demonstrate that any BPMN model can be serialized as OWL file. Based on ontological analysis and a corresponding definition of a modeling notation as ontology we show that business process models can be transformed from one notation into another one as long as there are common underlying concepts; this is demonstrated with the case of an actor based, or subject-oriented, view on business processes. Furthermore, a reference architecture for Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) based on microservices is discussed which is capable of executing actor based business process models. As a transformation of BPMN models into the actor based view is generally possible, also BPMN models could be enacted. As a result, we can conclude that the actor system is a promising way to stimulate new ways to design workflow management systems and to design business process modeling languages which are more comfortable to use by non-experts without losing necessary expressiveness. Another result is that an ontology is a productive way to define a modeling notation as it can be used as knowledge base, it is a formal conceptualization of the underlying notions, and can be semantically enriched for further use.

Robert Singer

In this paper, we propose to rethink the dominant logic of how to model business processes. We think that an actor based approach supports in a much better way the fundamental nature of business processes. We present a proposal for a compiler architecture to model and execute business processes as a set of communicating microservices that are hosted on a general purpose virtual machine for distributed execution.

Robert Singer, Johannes Kotremba, Stefan Raß

We discuss a fully featured multienterprise business process plattform (ME-BPP) based on the concepts of agent-based business processes. Using the concepts of the subject-oriented business process (S-BPM) methodology we developed an architecture to realize a platform for the execution of distributed business processes. The platform is implemented based on cloud technology using commercial services. For our discussion we used the well known Service Interaction Patterns, as they are empirically developed from typical business-to-business interactions. We can demonstrate that all patterns can be easily modeled and executed based on our architecture. We propose therefore a change from a control flow based to an agent based view to model and enact business processes.

Robert Singer

We discuss questions about user centric development of business process modeling notations. In the center of our research there is a fully featured multi-enterprise business process platform (ME-BPP) based on the concepts of agent-based business processes, which builds on the formal foundations of the subject-oriented business process management methodology (S-BPM). The platform is implemented based on cloud technology using commercial services. Additionally we developed a "block modeling" technique to find a semantically transparent modeling notation which can be used by novice users to model subject-oriented business process (S-BPM) models. As this is ongoing research there are still serious open questions. But, the presented approach breaks with some of the rules of typical process modeling notations and hopefully stimulates innovation. Additionally we want to continue our research towards the enhancement of our modeling approach towards a user centric "syntax and semantic free" modeling technique to develop user and domain specific modeling notations.