Abstract
Business process modelling languages enable the depiction of the processes of an organisation by exploiting graphical symbols to denote the key elements to be represented. Despite the variety of approaches, graphical symbols, and (in)formal interpretations associated to the different languages, a fundamental component of every business process modelling language is the representation of the way activities are related by means of control arcs and gateways. While multiple kinds of relationships may hold among such activities, mainstream business process modelling languages seem actually only interested in modelling a single (very important) kind of relationship, namely the activity execution order within the control flow. In this paper we investigate the role of another kind of fundamental relationship between activities, namely ontological dependence, in the context of business process modelling. In particular, we introduce three forms of generic ontological dependence, namely historical dependence, causal dependence, and goal-based co-occurrence. We illustrate different forms in which they can occur, we introduce a language to express them and we discuss their usefulness in two concrete use cases.
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Notes
- 1.
While co-occurrences may, in principle, be based on different elements, goals seem to play a fundamental role in co-occurrences in all the business processes (models) we have examined for this work. We leave the investigation of other forms of co-occurrences for future work.
- 2.
We follow previous work in the area of BPM and focus on process models with no repeating activities, in the spirit of [1]. The investigation of dependences between repeated activities occurring in loops is left for future work.
- 3.
The computation of the average process cycle time is based on flow analysis [9] and depends on the structure of the process. In this case, the average time required for a process execution is given by the average time required by: (i) the sum of the time required by the activities in sequence before the first split AND gateway, which is, in turn, given by the sum of the average times of the activities in sequence (\((1+1+1.2+6+0.5+2+0.5)\)h\(\, = 12.2\)h); (ii) the sum of the times required by the most costly branches of the two AND blocks, i.e., the one dealing with the optional request to the doctor of the medical file and the one related to the ticket payment receipt. The former is computed as the weighted (with the corresponding probabilities) average of the two alternative branches between the XOR split and the XOR join, (i.e., \(((0.95*(0.5+24+1.5))+(0*0.05))\)h\(\,= 24.7\)h), while the second is the sum of the average cycle time of the activities Ask for ticket payment and Receive ticket payment, (i.e., \((0.5+12)\)h = 12.5h), respectively; and (iii) the time required by the last two activities (i.e., \((3+1)\)h = 4h). The average cycle time is hence \((12.2+24.7+12.5+4)\)h\(\,= 53.4\)h.
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Acknowledgments
This research has been partially carried out within the Euregio IPN12 KAOS, which is funded by the “European Region Tyrol-South Tyrol-Trentino” (EGTC) under the first call for basic research projects.
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Adamo, G., Borgo, S., Di Francescomarino, C., Ghidini, C., Guarino, N., Sanfilippo, E.M. (2018). Business Process Activity Relationships: Is There Anything Beyond Arrows?. In: Weske, M., Montali, M., Weber, I., vom Brocke, J. (eds) Business Process Management Forum. BPM 2018. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 329. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98651-7_4
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