A Dataflow-Oriented Modeling Approach to Business Processes

This paper presents a dataflow-oriented modeling approach (called DMA) targeted at business processes that operate on the entities forming an information system. The approach promotes the integration between business processes and information systems in that process models result from the interconnection of tasks and dataflow nodes. The latter denote flows of business entities of the same type and state. The entity types along with their relationships and attributes are shown in a companion information model. DMA leverages the dataflow to represent human decisions, which may concern the selection of the input entities when a task needs more than one, and the selection of the task with which to handle the input entities when two or more tasks are admissible. An example related to an order handling process illustrates the representation of human choices. DMA process models build on the artifact-oriented approach in that they combine the life cycles of the business entities involved. The life cycles can be separated and this facilitates the comparison with reference models. A major contribution of the paper is the presentation of the extraction algorithm which provides the separated life cycles.