Semantic Business Process Modeling - Principles, Design Support and Realization

Verlag: Shaker-Verlag, Aachen

Due to constantly changing market conditions, customer requirements and new jurisdiction, or resulting from the integration in electronic supply chains, companies need to change or even restructure their processes and the associated software frequently. Often, changes to a software are only possible by developers, who need to adapt the source code of complex applications manually, making it diffcult to realize upcoming requirements in short time.

Using model-driven software engineering, an additional level of abstraction can be achieved, which facilitates the comprehension and therefore, adaptation of systems. However, different understanding of the used terms in domain models often leads to unnecessary debate between the involved persons. To avoid this, a mechanism is necessary to describe the semantics of terms explicitly.

In this thesis we present an approach to automating the design, adaptation and realization of models. Thereby, we focus on business process models as an example for dynamic models. To capture the semantics of the used terms, techniques from the research field semantic web are transferred to the modeling area. More detailed, we show how process models can be semantically annotated. These semantic annotations are used to compute proposals of process models that only need to be checked and maybe refined by the modeler, reducing the amount of manual work. Furthermore, we show how existing process models can automatically be adapted when requirements have changed. Once it has been evaluated which process fragments are affected by new requirements, these can automatically be replaced in all existing process models.

As part of a developed methodology, we show that the realization of process models can further be automated using model-driven technologies, while saving the explicit semantics that has been specified in addition to the model. The developed methodology explains in detail how business processes can be executed using semantic web services. The presented approach is evaluated in various ways, e.g. in case studies or by investigating the benefits of the approach and its prototypical implementation in a series of workshops.