BPMN 2.0 Handbook Second Edition

My article "Collaborative Activities Inside Pools" has been published again in this 2nd Edition!
 

Following the ground-breaking body of work in the BPMN 2.0 Handbook First Edition in 2010, this book is greatly expanded with substantial new content and chapters updated to the latest advances in this important standard.

** Detailed Table of Contents with full abstracts of each chapter here (9 pages PDF, no registration required)**

Every chapter from the First Edition was closely examined by its authors and updated to the very latest information. Six completely new chapters and another 50 pages were also added. Authored by members of WfMC, OMG and other key participants in the development of BPMN 2.0, the BPMN 2.0 Handbook Second Edition assembles industry thought-leaders and international experts.
The authors examine a variety of aspects that start with an introduction of what’s new and updated in BPMN 2.0, and look closely at interchange, best practices, analytics, conformance, optimization, choreography and more from a technical perspective. The authors also address the business imperative for widespread adoption of the standard by examining best practice guidelines, BPMN business strategy and the human interface including real-life case studies. Other critical chapters tackle the practical aspects of making a BPMN model executable and the basic timeline analysis of a BPMN model. In addition to free bonus chapters from the latest edition and extra material supplied by authors, the BPMN 2.0 Companion website contains BPMN and XPDL Verification/Validation files, webinars, videos, product specs, tools, free/trial modelers etc. This gives readers exposure to a larger resource on BPMN 2.0 and XPDL than a book alone can offer.
-- mchinosi

BPMN: An introduction to the standard - Update

This post just to update the previous one. The article has been published in the CSI Journal. Herewith the details:

BPMN: An introduction to the standard
Computer Standards & Interfaces
Volume 34, Issue 1, January 2012, Pages 124–134
Received 23 May 2011. Accepted 6 June 2011. Available online 13 June 2011.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.csi.2011.06.002

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920548911000766


-- mchinosi

Interesting Research @ Vishal Saxena's blog

I wish to thank Vishal Saxena for having published today a post about my Ph.D. Thesis.

http://vishals.blogspot.com/2009/02/interesting-research-michele-chinosi.html

-- mchinosi

A Brief Ph.D. Thesis Summary

I wish to publish a brief summary of the content of my Ph.D. Thesis "Representing Business Processes: Conceptual Model and Design Methodology" emphasizing some important aspects. Feel free to comment this text or to contact me directly. Thank you.

The main key points of my work are: a new conceptual model for BPs; an XML serialization of such model; a BP design methodology and business process diagrams views. I refer to the model as 'conceptual' because it was not sufficiently formalized to be considered a complete meta-model, even if I think that its base concepts are detailed enough to be considered a solid base for reasoning about BP(MN) modeling. I haven't too much formalized the model because of the forthcoming BPMN 2.0 standard. I know I cannot compete with OMG and with the two submission proposals.

The conceptual model was originally developed to support and test our assumptions. However, it has some characteristics which could be taken into consideration while dealing with BPMN meta-model. Besides, the XML serialization of the model started some years ago to overcome the lack of a complete and compliant BPMN XML serialization. Nowadays, I think it can be very interesting to look at this XML-Schema model because of its simple and linear structure as well as for its main features: among others, it is a self-validating XML serialization of BPMN. This means that it is possible to natively check the syntax of a diagram, all the BPMN structural semantics rules and most of the behavioral semantics rules.

That is, we can check quite all the rules provided by BPMN 1.1 specifications which could be checked without a simulation or an execution of the process (for instance, we can check if a process has loops, but we can not check whether those loops are infinite loops). So, it is a simple but powerful enough model to describe all the relevant features of BPs.

Using this model, I've been able to provide a design methodology for BPs, while there are not other concrete proposals for this field. I think my work is one of the first contribution in the area of conceptual modeling of BPs and I believe that my effort could be very interesting, especially if we consider the survey presented by Rosemann during the last BPM conference in Milan (where he talked about the next BP challenges). The concept of views applied to BPs is another outcome which can be seen as a first preliminary result, because also in this case there are not other works regarding the possibility to emphasize different parts of a process. Some products offer this feature, but it is an artifact not supported by a native definition of views. Views permit us also to investigate several applications. In particular to define end users policies (at present not provided by BPMN standard neither by other notations). This implies the possibility to differentiate users access to BPs simplifying the process management inside companies. To access or modify a BP become no-more time consuming tasks. Moreover, the interest on security and privacy related topics arises and views could become the way through which these policies could be implemented.

-- mchinosi

On April 21-23, 2008 I will be in Washington DC at Architecture and Process conference to present a panel on XPDL weakenesses.
Here are the main ones I found starting from the analysis of the example presented on XPDL specification document [WFMC-TC-1025]:

• an high complexity of the diagram
• a great fragmentation of the information
• a weak referential integrity (there are no unique IDs inside the XML-Schema definition)
• very complex queries
  

On BPeX project page it is possible to download a more detailed description of these points.

Fig. 1: EOrder main process

Fig. 2: The XPDL version

Fig. 3: The BPeX version

-- mchinosi

BPeX Editor: New Screenshot

Here it is a new screenshot of our editor for BPMN:

















-- mchinosi

Orange + Apples

Keith Swenson has recently published an interesting question in his blog: Are Apples more useful than Oranges? where he argues that it is not possible to compare BPEL and XPDL because they are two different things (like Apples and Oranges). Besides, it is possible to guess how he leans a bit towards XPDL.

Bruce Silver replied on his blog (quoting and paraphrasing also original Keith's post) with an article (The Real Issues with XPDL, BPEL, and BPMN) in which he says:

In other words, XPDL captures the diagram, while BPEL captures the process semantics. Keith dismisses the latter as just the information an "execution engine" would need to know. Technically that's true of BPEL, I suppose. But which of these best represents the process model? The part that Keith glosses over is a process diagram is not the same as a process model. The argument over whether BPEL or XPDL is more "portable" is based on different interpretations of what portable means. If you mean the same process semantics can be executed on two different engines, then BPEL is more portable. If you mean that the same diagram can be created in two different tools, then XPDL — especially if you allow the target tool to ignore the graphical details that don't carry over.

and

BPMN is a modeling notation — more than just a diagram, since each element has defined process semantics, abstracted from implementation details — but BPMN has no official XML schema, i.e. no interchange format. XPDL 2.0 was explicitly created to capture all the elements of BPMN 1.0 for interchange, but — here's the part that Keith omits — from a diagram portability perspective, not a model portability perspective. That's because OMG (actually this dates back to BPMI) never defined which BPMN elements and attributes, and their associated process semantics, have to be supported by a "compliant" tool.

Finally, in the last two paragraph, he says that neither XPDL nor BPEL today meets the real need of the BPM community, which is a portable serialization of process models [...] that is independent of implementation architecture. At this end he underlines the lack of an XML-Schema for BPMN (If OMG does not publish a BPMN schema, I see more consternation in BPM-Land and a second chance for XPDL to get it right).

Keith replied again and then Bruce and, again, Keith and Bruce together through comments (The Diagram IS the Meaning, Diagrams, Models, and Metamodels... Oh My!).

I wish to thank either Keith and Bruce for their discussion because it is very interesting!

Moreover, I'm very happy because their words sound very well for my research! The main goal we would like to achieve is to build an XML-Schema for BPMN! An XML-Schema that should be complete as XPDL and 'executable' as BPEL. It should have a hierarchical structure to reflect a precise data model (which is compliant to the BPMN specifications). From our model it is possible to derive an XPDL (is this an 'Apple'?) file or a BPEL (is this the 'Orange'?) tree. In these cases we will have that either BPEL and XPDL will be subsets of our BPeX. We will have all data provided by the two notations. Apples + Oranges. A stub of our work is available on our project page.

Refresh your summer with a 'fruit salad'!

-- mchinosi

My new blog

Since all my personal research gurus have a blog, I decided to open my new blog!
Here I aim to publish the results and the steps of my PhD research about BPMN, BPEL, XPDL, and so on.
I and my collegues are developing an Eclipse-based editor to design BPMN diagrams using a structured hierarchical data model as core. It's name is BPeXEd, stands for BPeX Editor.
BPeX is the name we give to our research, as for Business Process eXtensions. We aim to extend formats and specifications adding some solid (should be 'formal'?) backend. This will permit us to provide some useful feature like the validation of the Business Process Diagrams, the serialization in XML formats, the security and privacy support, some metrics, the conjugation of data objects towards a more real format (like DB or XML trees), and so on.

Please, feel free to post your comments about my/our work!
It would be appreciated!

To see more in details our projects and to read some papers about that, please visit our project page on SourceForge.

-- mchinosi