Business Process Modeling

Process modeling and workflow applications have become more an more important during last decade. The main reason for this increased interest is the need to provide computer aided system integration of the enterprise based on its business processes. This need requires a technology that enables to integrate modeling, simulation and enactment of processes into one single package. The primary focus of all tools is to describe the way how activities are ordered in time. This kind of partially ordered steps shows how the output of one activity can serve as the input to another one. But there is also another aspect of the business process that has to be involved --where the activities are executed. The spatial aspect of the process enactment represents a new dimension in the process engineering discipline. It is also important to understand that not just process enactment but also the early phases of process specification have to cope with this spatial aspect. The paper is going to discuss how all these above mentioned principles can be integrated together and how the standard approach in process specification might be extended with the spatial dimension to make business process models more natural and understandable.