RAL: A High-Level User-Oriented Resource Assignment Language for Business Processes

Abstract

An important task of business process design is the definition of what and how members of an organization are involved in the activities of the business processes developed within it. In this paper we analyse the capabilities of BPMN 2.0, the de-facto standard for business process modelling, in this regard. The conclusion is that, although it provides some mechanisms to assign resources to business process activities, they present several drawbacks. On the one hand, it does not provide a clear way to relate the assignment of resources with a model of the structure of the organization. On the other hand, it relies on XPath as the default language to assign resources to activities. The consequence is that it has limitations regarding the expressiveness of resource assignment expressions. Furthermore, it makes resource assignment not easy to learn and use since XPath has not been designed for that purpose. To overcome these drawbacks we introduce RAL (Resource Assignment Language), a DSL based on a well-known organizational metamodel that can be used together with BPMN 2.0. RAL provides more expressiveness to the resource assignments and it uses a high-level sintaxis defined to be used by technically unskilled users.

This work has been partially supported by the European Commission (FEDER), Spanish Government under the CICYT project SETI (TIN2009-07366); and projects THEOS (TIC-5906) and ISABEL (P07-TIC-2533) funded by the Andalusian Local Government.