Business process activity relationships: Is there anything beyond arrows?

Business process modelling languages enable the depiction of the processes of an organisation by exploiting graphical symbols to denote the key elements to be represented. Despite the variety of approaches, graphical symbols, and (in)formal interpretations associated to the different languages, a fundamental component of every business process modelling language is the representation of the way activities are related by means of control arcs and gateways. While multiple kinds of relationships may hold among such activities, mainstream business process modelling languages seem actually only interested in modelling a single (very important) kind of relationship, namely the activity execution order within the control flow. In this paper we investigate the role of another kind of fundamental relationship between activities, namely ontological dependence, in the context of business process modelling. In particular, we introduce three forms of generic ontological dependence, namely historical dependence, causal dependence, and goal-based co-occurrence. We illustrate different forms in which they can occur, we introduce a language to express them and we discuss their usefulness in two concrete use cases.

Tipo Pubblicazione: 
Contributo in atti di convegno
Author or Creator: 
Adamo, Greta
Borgo, Stefano
Di Francescomarino, Chiara
Ghidini, Chiara
Guarino, Nicola
Sanfilippo, Emilio M.
Publisher: 
Springer, Berlin , Germania
Springer, Cham, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, London, CHE
Source: 
16th International Conference on Business Process Management, pp. 53–70, Sydney, Australia, 9-14/09/2018
info:cnr-pdr/source/autori:Adamo, Greta; Borgo, Stefano; Di Francescomarino, Chiara; Ghidini, Chiara; Guarino, Nicola; Sanfilippo, Emilio M./congresso_nome:16th International Conference on Business Process Management/congresso_luogo:Sydney, Australia/cong
Date: 
2018
Resource Identifier: 
http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/414379
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98651-7_4
info:doi:10.1007/978-3-319-98651-7_4
http://www.scopus.com/record/display.url?eid=2-s2.0-85053516752&origin=inward
urn:isbn:9783319986500
Language: 
Eng
ISTC Author: 
Ritratto di Stefano Borgo
Real name: