Policy-enabled goal-oriented requirements engineering for semantic Business Process Management

Business Process Management is a paradigm for enterprise computing that uses IT not only to support or execute business processes but also to continuously monitor and improve these processes to better achieve business objectives. A variant on Business Process Management, called Semantic Business Process Management, is meant to further close the gap between business and IT by attaching business semantics to the technology artifacts used for Business Process Management. A current problem in Semantic Business Process Management is that the specification of the business requirements that processes must respond to and that follow from the enterprise's strategic decisions, is not fully integrated within the design of the processes themselves. In this paper, we propose an approach in which business requirements for business processes are formally modeled and the skeleton of the designs of these business processes is automatically generated from these models. The approach presented here focuses upon the modeling of policies (i.e., a kind of business requirements for business processes) and on the subsequent design of business processes that comply to these policies. A first contribution is extending an existing goal-oriented requirements specification language, i.e. Formal Tropos, to incorporate policies, called Policy-extended Formal Tropos. A second contribution is offering an automated transformation to create business process design skeletons out of the Policy-extended Formal Tropos models. The paper also reports upon three pilot studies that were conducted as a first, though preliminary, empirical test of our approach. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.