An integrated visual approach for business process modelling

Abstract

Current approaches to modelling complex business processes fail to scale to large organizations. Key issues are “cobweb” and “labyrinth” problems exhibited by conventional box and Iine metaphors and large numbers of hidden dependencies introduced by compartment-based modularity. They require Iong term memory of users; have restrictions on expressiveness; and Iack multiple levels of abstractions (Schnieders and Puhlmann 2005; Zhu and Grundy et al, 2007). Splitting up diagrams, even with good tool support, leads to implicit relationships among diagrams and navigational difficulties (Recker and Niehaves 2008; Grundy and Hosking et al, 2006). Our earlier work (Anderson and Apperley 1990; Phillips 1995; Li and Phillips et al, 2004) on modelling complex user interfaces and their behaviour with visual dialogue notations demonstrated that a tree-based overlay structure can effectively mitigate these complexity problems. In addition, trees support rapid navigation, elision and automatic layout in ways difficult to achieve with graph-based approaches. This research is to develop an integrated visual approach for business process modelling. It includes a novel tree-overlay based visual notation (EML) and its integrated support environment (MaramaEML) to supplement and integrate with existing visual modeling solutions. In EML, complex business architectures are represented as service trees and business processes are modelled as process overlay sequences on the service trees. By combining these two mechanisms EML gives users a clear overview of a whole enterprise system with business processes modelled by overlays on the same view. MaramaEML is developed using the Eclipse-based Marama framework. It integrates EML and BPMN to provide high-level business service modelling. It supports automatic BPEL code generation from the graphical representations and facilitates process code validation using LTSA. It also provides a distortion-based fisheye and zooming function to enhance complex diagram navigation ability.