Business Process Modelling and Design — A Formal Model and Methodology

This paper presents a formal framework for representing enterprise knowledge. The concepts of our framework (objectives and goals, roles and actors, actions and processes, responsibilities and constraints) allow business analysts to capture knowledge about an enterprise in a way that is both intuitive and mathematically formal. It also outlines the basic steps of a methodology that allows business analysts to go from high-level enterprise objectives, to detailed and formal specifications of business processes that can be enacted to realise these objectives. The formal language used means that the specifications can be verified as having certain correctness properties, e.g. that responsibilities assigned to roles are fulfilled, and constraints are maintained as a result of process execution.

[1]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  Reasoning about Concurrent Execution Prioritized Interrupts, and Exogenous Actions in the Situation Calculus , 1997, IJCAI.

[2]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  The Frame Problem and Knowledge-Producing Actions , 1993, AAAI.

[3]  Axel van Lamsweerde,et al.  Managing Conflicts in Goal-Driven Requirements Engineering , 1998, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[4]  Pericles Loucopoulos,et al.  Enterprise Modelling and the Teleological Approach to Requirements Engineering , 1995, Int. J. Cooperative Inf. Syst..

[5]  Dimitrios Plexousakis.  On the Efficient Maintenance of Temporal Integrity in Knowledge Bases , 1996 .

[6]  Dimitris Plexousakis,et al.  A Formal Model for Business Process Modeling and Design , 2000, CAiSE.

[7]  E. A. Kendall,et al.  Role Models — Patterns of Agent System Analysis and Design , 1999 .

[8]  Greg O’Hare,et al.  Cooperative Knowledge Processing: The Key Technology for Intelligent Organizations , 1996 .

[9]  Anand S. Rao,et al.  A Methodology and Modelling Technique for Systems of BDI Agents , 1996, MAAMAW.

[10]  Bill Curtis,et al.  Process modeling , 1992, CACM.

[11]  Daniel Marcu,et al.  Foundations of a Logical Approach to Agent Programming , 1995, ATAL.

[12]  Annie I. Antón,et al.  Goal Decomposition and Scenario Analysis in Business Process Reengineering , 1994, CAiSE.

[13]  John E. Dobson,et al.  The ORDIT approach to organisational requirements , 1994 .

[14]  M. Ould.  Business Processes: Business Processes: Modelling and Analysis for Re-Engineering and Improvement , 1995 .

[15]  John Mylopoulos,et al.  AI Models for Business Process Reengineering , 1996, IEEE Expert.

[16]  John Mylopoulos,et al.  Modeling Dynamic Domains with ConGolog , 1999, CAiSE.

[17]  Richard Fikes,et al.  STRIPS: A New Approach to the Application of Theorem Proving to Problem Solving , 1971, IJCAI.

[18]  Thomas H. Davenport,et al.  Process Innovation: Reengineering Work Through Information Technology , 1992 .

[19]  Vladimir Lifschitz,et al.  Artificial intelligence and mathematical theory of computation: papers in honor of John McCarthy , 1991 .

[20]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  A Situation Calculus Approach to Modeling and Programming Agents , 1999 .

[21]  Jintae Lee.  Goal-based process analysis: a method for systematic process redesign , 1993, COCS '93.

[22]  Monique Snoeck,et al.  Enterprise Modelling , 1998, ECOOP Workshops.

[23]  Manolis Koubarakis,et al.  Business Process Modeling and Design: AI Models and Methodology , 1999 .

[24]  Philippe Massonet,et al.  Goal-directed elaboration of requirements for a meeting scheduler: problems and lessons learnt , 1995, Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE'95).

[25]  Stephen Fickas,et al.  Goal-Directed Requirements Acquisition , 1993, Sci. Comput. Program..

[26]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Using Intelligent Agents to Manage Business Processes , 1996, PAAM.

[27]  Pericles Loucopoulos,et al.  System Requirements Engineering , 1995, System Requirements Engineering.

[28]  Pericles Loucopoulos,et al.  Goal-Driven Business Process Analysis - Application in Electricity Deregulation , 1998, CAiSE.

[29]  Frank Leymann,et al.  Managing Business Processes an an Information Resource , 1994, IBM Syst. J..

[30]  F. Caeldries.  Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution , 1994 .

[31]  J. Mylopoulos,et al.  Using goals, rules, and methods to support reasoning in business process reengineering , 1996, 1994 Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[32]  John Mylopoulos,et al.  Representing and Using Nonfunctional Requirements: A Process-Oriented Approach , 1992, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[33]  John Mylopoulos,et al.  Understanding "why" in software process modelling, analysis, and design , 1994, Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[34]  Dimitris Plexousakis,et al.  Simulation and analysis of business processes using GOLOG , 1995, COCS '95.

[35]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  The Frame Problem in the Situation Calculus: A Simple Solution (Sometimes) and a Completeness Result for Goal Regression , 1991, Artificial and Mathematical Theory of Computation.