Interaction and Interconnection Modeling Using BPMN
Background
The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is the de-facto standard for process modeling. It is mostly used for describing dependencies between activities within the same organization. However, BPMN can also be used for describing cross-organizational process integration. This process choreography view is important for optimizing business processes spanning multiple organizations and can help to significantly improve overall process performance.
Two choreography modeling styles can be distinguished: Interaction modeling vs. interconnection modeling. While the former focuses on atomic interactions and describes dependencies between them on a global level, the latter is based on individual participant behavior descriptions that are interconnected through message flow connections. The two styles have different suitability in different situations but must be bridged through tool support.
Recent implementation efforts in the BPT group have led to a browser-based BPMN editor (see
http://b3mn.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/server.php).
Task
The thesis will focus on bridging the two choreography modeling styles in BPMN by providing trans-formation and analysis functionality. As part of that formal considerations based on e.g. Petri nets must be undertaken. The existing BPMN editor should be extended for supporting the two modeling styles and providing the mentioned functionality. Furthermore, abstraction mechanisms in the sense of extracting the communication behavior of an organization from the given definition of the internal behavior might also be a point of investigation.
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