“Integrating
the outputs of the two modeling approaches is a challenging task. First,
business process models tend to be visual in nature. Business rules, however,
tend to be text-oriented. Second, they have different composing elements.
Third, they are designed for different purposes - process models describe how
things should happen, whereas business rules describe what should happen.
Finally, the overlap and inconsistencies between business process models and
business rules also presents a significant challenge”. This paper is about a
framework that integrates BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation 2.0),
process modeling language, and SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and
Business Rules), rules modeling language.
Most
available frameworks follow a top-down approach, and that integration should
happen in the design stage, which is correct but not realistic. As in reality
most organisations already have existing processes’ models and rules’ models
that are separate, and the real problem facing organisations is integrating
these existing models. That’s why a bottom-up approach is required, where
integration happens in analysis stage. “The bottom-up integration framework is
built around a collection of mapping methods that provide distinct ways in
which overlap and consistency (or lack of) between processes and rules can be
studied”.
Integration
framework have two main aspects; semantic and structural aspects. Semantics
aspects are about providing a reference that can provide a mapping between the
two languages terms. Structural aspects are dealing with how the two languages
have different structures. This paper only looked into structural aspects.
XML
Process Definition Language (XPDL) was used as a canonical intermediate
language to bridge the gap between BPMN, a visual process modeling approach,
and SBVR, a text based business rule’s modeling language. Because, it is
standardized and well supported, also it has the ability to transfer BPMN
graphical notations into text representation.
To
provide a mapping, both languages have to be broken down to the main
components. SBVR was brought down to Name, Term, Verb, and four types of
keywords. While BPMN consist of: activities, events, gateways, and
participants. XPDL is used to translate each one of these BPMN components into
XPDL tags and then mapped into SBVR component (a table is provided in the
paper). The proposed approach do not have a way to present the model operation
in BPMN except using ‘must’ or ‘it is obligatory’, which is considered a
limitation of the solution. The paper also provided a car sale process and its
business rules to demonstrate the proposed solution and prove its
effectiveness.
Cheng et al. in provided a bottom-up approach to integrate
process models and business rules models in an analysis stage. There approach
was specific to integrating BPMN process models with SBVR rules models. It used
XPDL to translate the BPMN diagrams to text representation and then used these
tags to map the business rules models, and finally producing a new model that
include both the process and the rules. Even thought the approach was applied
to BPMN and SBVR, but the idea can be generalized to other languages. A
limitation to the approach, that it was only able to represent BPMN operations
using either ‘must’ or ‘it is obligatory’. The approach did not invent a new
language. It made use of XPDL and its ability to translate BPMN diagrams into
XML tags. The main contribution was providing a list of the main components of
the process language (BPMN) and the rules language (SBVR), and using XPDL to
map these components to each other.
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