A Language and Methodology based on Scenarios, Grammars and Views, for Administrative Business Processes Modelling

Abstract

In Business Process Management (BPM), process modelling has been solved in various ways. However, there are no commonly accepted modelling tools (languages). Some of them are criticized for their inability to capture both the lifecycle, informational and organizational models of processes. For some others, process modelling is generally done using a single graph; this does not facilitate modularity, maintenance and scalability. In addition, some of these languages are very general; hence, their application to specific domain processes (such as administrative processes) is very complex. In this paper, we present a new language and a new methodology, dedicated to administrative process modelling. This language is based on a variant of attributed grammars and is able to capture the lifecycle, informational and organizational models of such processes. Also, it proposes a simple graphical formalism allowing to model each process's execution scenario as an annotated tree (modularity). In the new language, a particular emphasis is put on modelling (using "views") the perceptions that actors have on processes and their data.

Non-Recursive LSAWfP Models are Structured Workflows

“…In the BPM domain, the study of the expressiveness of workflow languages is a common practice whose goal is to show their credibility; however, previous works on LSAWfP have paid insufficient attention to this aspect. For instance, the work in [4] shows that, for its control flow, LSAWfP supports the four basic routings, namely: sequential, parallel, alternative and iterative routings; but, the results of this study don't provide sufficient evidence to characterise the class(es) of workflows supported by LSAWfP. The contribution of this paper is to formally establish that LSAWfP models whose GMWf does not admit recursivity 2 (non-recursive LSAWfP models) are structured workflows.…”

“…The obtained specification after modelling a process with LSAWfP is called a LSAWfP model. A preliminary study of LSAWfP's expressiveness in [4], shows that it supports the basic routings pattern (sequential, parallel, alternative, iterative) in the definition of control flows. But, in this study, we are interested in a restricted form of LSAWfP models named non-recursive LSAWfP models that can be defined as follows:…”

“…LSAWfP (a Language for the Specification of Administrative Workflow Processes) is a workflow language proposed by Zekeng et al [4]. In this one, the process control flow is modelled using a grammar G = (S, P, A) called Grammatical Model of Workflow (GMWf) defined as follows :…”

“…Among the most significant workflow languages are BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation, considered as the de-facto workflow language) [2], WF-Net (Workflow Net) [3] and YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language) [3]. In 2020, Zekeng et al proposed the Language for the Specification of Administrative Workflow Processes (LSAWfP) [4] addressing several issues encountered by classical languages, notably: the absence of formal semantics, the use of processes as modelling units, the obtention of either non-executable specifications or contextspecific executable ones, etc. LSAWfP proposes to model the control flow of a given process using a grammatical model called Grammatical Model of Workflow (GMWf).…”