A Model-Based Approach to Enhance the Communication Between the Participants of Collaborative Business Processes

Abstract

Business process modeling is used to model business processes using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), which is a widely accepted standard for process modeling. BPMN elements are visually represented by the existing model, but the expressiveness of elements in terms of communication between the participants of the business process is a problem reported in modeling literature. Business processes use collaboration models to gain increasing importance in software development, describing their behavior and interaction. Recent years have seen the presentation of various approaches to ensure communication between business process pools. Despite the widespread adoption of BPMN for business process modeling, existing collaboration models often suffer from significant limitations in accurately capturing complex collaborative business processes. The existing approaches do not ensure proper structure and syntax for collaboration elements. The flow of information among multiple pools causes ambiguity in the developed business process. A Collaborative Business Process Model (CBPM) is proposed to address this issue, based on modeling rules that ensure proper syntax and structure of the models. The proposed CBPM also guarantees that the model is a better approach for participant interaction. This approach contributes to improving the communication mechanism between the participants of collaborative business processes. Moreover, we formally analyze and verify the working of CBPM by specifying the model in Z specification language. Performance evaluation regarding the flow of messages through test case coverage criteria indicates that the model is capable of ensuring successful communication among the multiple participants of business processes.

Keywords

• Business process modeling
• collaborative business processes
• syntactic
• structural
• participants