Monday, 21 November 2011

Summary: Framework for Business Process and Rule Integration: A Case of BPMN and SBVR



R. Cheng, S. W. Sadiq, and M. Indulska. Framework for business process and rule integration: A case of bpmn and sbvr. In W. Abramowicz, editor, BIS, volume 87 of Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, pages 13–24. Springer, 2011.

“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.


in L.R.:
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.

No comments:

Post a Comment