Refining Business Processes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal calculus for refining business process models, enabling incremental detail addition and consistency across different abstraction levels, which improves communication and integration of process information.

Contribution

It presents a novel refinement calculus for business process models that supports incremental development and maintains model validity across abstraction levels.

Findings

Supports decomposition of processes and data channels

Allows extension of interface and channel structures

Ensures consistency during incremental refinement

Abstract

In this paper we present a calculus for re nement of business process models based on a precisede nition of business processes and process nets Business process models are a vital concept for communicating with experts of the application domain Depending on the roles and responsibilities of the application domain experts involved process models are discussed on different levels of abstraction These may range from detailed regulations for process execution to the interrelation of basic core processes on a strategic level To ensure consistency and to allow for a exible integration of process information on di erent levels of abstraction we introduce re nement rules that allow the incremental addition to and re nement of the information in a process model while maintaining the validity of more abstract high level processes In particular we allow the decomposition of single processes and logical data channels as well as the extension of the interface and channel structure to information that is newly gained or increased in relevance during the modeling process.