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Introducing Variables to Data Objects in BPMN

  • Conference paper
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Enterprise Design, Operations, and Computing. EDOC 2024 Workshops (EDOC 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 537))

  • 13 Accesses

Abstract

The management of data is crucial in today’s organizations, making it necessary to specify exactly how data is created, accessed, and manipulated during business process enactment. Given the importance of data, it comes as a surprise that approaches like BPMN only provide limited support for modeling data and how it is read and written. In particular, they cannot represent multiple data objects of the same type, and they lack concise semantics for multi-instance data objects. Against this background, this paper proposes an extension to BPMN process models by introducing variable identifiers to distinguish individual data objects of the same class in a given process. The behavior is detailed using translational semantics to Colored Petri nets, and a set of verification mechanisms is presented that allow for a more precise analysis of data objects in business processes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/bptlab/bpmn-data-object-variables.

  2. 2.

    https://cpntools.org/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Maximilian König, Tom Lichtenstein, Anjo Seidel & Mathias Weske

Authors
  1. Maximilian König
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  2. Tom Lichtenstein
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  3. Anjo Seidel
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  4. Mathias Weske
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maximilian König .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Monika Kaczmarek-Heß

  2. Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, Mönchengladbach, Germany

    Kristina Rosenthal

  3. Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

    Marek Suchánek

  4. Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Miguel Mira Da Silva

  5. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Henderik A. Proper

  6. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Marianne Schnellmann

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König, M., Lichtenstein, T., Seidel, A., Weske, M. (2025). Introducing Variables to Data Objects in BPMN. In: Kaczmarek-Heß, M., Rosenthal, K., Suchánek, M., Da Silva, M.M., Proper, H.A., Schnellmann, M. (eds) Enterprise Design, Operations, and Computing. EDOC 2024 Workshops . EDOC 2024. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 537. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-79059-1_9

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