Business Process Modeling

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1Scope

Business process modeling allows the user to represent business processes, so they may be analysed and/or improved. Often, the main goal is to identify cost-intensive activities, in- crease speed and/or quality, to reduce cycle time or costs. Nowadays, there is available sev- eral business process modeling techniques such as flowchart, data flows, gantt charts, UML diagrams and much more. One of the techniques is BPMN (Business Process Modeling No- tation), where a graphical representation is used with standard objects. If you want to get more technical, it can also be defined as a set of graphical objects and rules defining available connections between the objects. In order to allow the user to benefit from the

Business process models are expressed in a given process modeling language and, although it exists for many years now, as for instance UML Activity Diagrams, EPCs (Event-Driven Process Chains) and Petri Nets, they were not deemed to be easily used and understood by business and IT parties in order to communicate relevant business process semantics. As so, the OMG commissioned the development of the BPMN, currently standing as version 2. BPMN2 has become a de facto standard in industry and services. According to the OMG, it may be usable and understandable for all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes (Group,

To reach the first objective a thorough survey will be carried out and presented in this dissertation to support the understanding of the well-formedness rules and best practices set described in Correia and e Abreu (2012), and if they may be covered by a set of BPMN2 modeling tools. To fulfill the second objective, we will integrate a metamodel- based validation facility, developed in the QUASAR group, in an open-source BPMN2 tool and perform an empirical study to check if such facility speeds up BPMN2 learning curve and reduce the resulting model