Enhancing BPMN 2.0 Informational Perspective to Support Interoperability for Cross-Organizational Business Processes

Abstract

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is being adopted as one of the industry standards for modeling cross-organizational business processes (CBPs). BPMN analyzes a business process as a set of interrelated activities, focusing primarily on the functional perspective of the process. However, for successful CBP modeling, an informational perspective is important. Although BPMN 2.0 supports information flow design, existing representations of data/information elements are not sufficient to support CBP modeling requirements. In this light, the paper proposes an approach for formal modeling and specification of information requirements used and generated in the CBPs. A UML View Profile is introduced to specify information requirements as views over the common reference ontology. A BPMN 2.0 extension is introduced to connect the defined views and the corresponding process activities. Ultimately, the proposed information requirements specification enables generation of the message instance and its transformation at the implementation level.