Business Process Management PDF

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Business Process Management Mathias Weske Business Process Management Concepts, Languages, Architectures Second Edition Mathias Weske Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) Universität Potsdam Potsdam, Germany ISBN 978-3-642-28615-5 ISBN 978-3-642-28616-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-28616-2 Springer Heid...

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Business Process Management

Mathias Weske

Business Process Management Concepts, Languages, Architectures Second Edition

Mathias Weske Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) Universität Potsdam Potsdam, Germany

ISBN 978-3-642-28616-2 (eBook) ISBN 978-3-642-28615-5 DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-28616-2 Springer Heidelberg Dordrecht London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2012938099 ACM Classification (1998): J.1, H.4.1, D.2.2 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007, 2012 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Violations are liable to prosecution under the German Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

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Foreword

Business Process Management (BPM) is a “hot topic” because it is highly relevant from a practical point of view while at the same it offers many challenges for software developers and scientists. Traditionally information systems used information modeling as a starting point, i.e., data-driven approaches have dominated the information systems landscape. However, over the last decade it has become clear that processes are equally important and need to be supported in a systematic manner. This resulted in a “wave” of workflow management systems in the mid-nineties. These systems aimed at the automation of structured processes. Therefore, their application was restricted to only a few application domains. However, the basic workflow concepts have been adopted by different types of “process-aware” information systems. BPM addresses the topic of process support in a broader perspective by incorporating different types of analysis (e.g., simulation, verification, and process mining) and linking processes to business and social aspects. Moreover, the current interest in BPM is fueled by technological developments (service oriented architectures) triggering standardization efforts (cf. languages such as BPMN and BPEL). Given the huge interest in BPM it is good that Mathias Weske took on the challenge to write a comprehensive book on BPM. The textbook covers the broad space of BPM in-depth. Most books on BPM are rather superficial or closely linked to a particular technology. In this book the topic is viewed from different angles without becoming superficial. Therefore, it is a valuable contribution to BPM literature. The book “Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, and Architectures” is motivated by practical challenges and is grounded in both computer science and business administration. The subtitle of the book adequately describes its scope. Unlike many other books in this space the focus is not on a particular notation or XML syntax. Instead the book focuses on the essential concepts. Different process languages are described (Petri nets, EPCs, Workflow nets, YAWL, BPMN, etc.) on the basis of these concepts. Moreover, the different languages are characterized and related using meta models. This is very important because it provides a view on the essence of VII

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business process models and prepares the reader for new languages and standards that will emerge in the future. Interestingly, the book also contains a chapter on process analysis. Here different soundness notions relevant for process verification are described and related. The last part of the book is related to architectures and methodologies. Two critical topics are discussed in detail: flexibility and service composition. Process flexibility is very important for the application of BPM in less structured domains. Through service composition a bridge is established between the service-oriented architecture and workflow technology. The book provides an excellent introduction into BPM. On the one hand, the book covers many topics and links concepts to concrete technologies. On the other hand, the book provides formal definitions and relates things through meta modeling. This makes it a superb textbook for students in both computer science and business administration. Moreover, it is also a very useful book for practitioners since it provides a comprehensive coverage of BPM independently of industry hypes around workflow management, business process management, and service-oriented architectures. Therefore, I expect that this book will help organizations in addressing the BPM topic in a more mature way. Eindhoven University of Technology, July 15th, 2007

Prof. dr.ir. Wil van der Aalst

Preface to Second Edition

Since the first edition of this book was published in late 2007, the business process management area has enjoyed an amazing development, both in industry and academia. To organize change and to achieve higher degrees of automation, more and more companies and public administrations put processes in the centre of their attention. While changing business requirements, paired with cost and time pressure are the driving forces of this development, important factors are dependable standards, sophisticated tools, and well educated people. Many young professionals graduating in computer science, business engineering, or related fields have enjoyed an education in business process management, focusing on complementary topics that range from technical aspects to business aspects. The business process management area is also fueled by the BPM Academic Initiative, which provides a professional process modeling and analysis tool free of charge for users in teaching and academic research. Today more than ten thousand students, lecturers, and researchers use this platform. I thank my colleagues in the core team for their involvement, namely Wil van der Aalst, Frank Leymann, Jan Mendling, Michael zur M¨ uhlen, Jan Recker, Michael Rosemann, and Gero Decker. Also in the name of the platform users, a special thanks to the Signavio team for providing this service to the BPM community. Just like the first edition, this book does not contain any teaching exercises. However, students and lecturers working with this book can register at the BPM Academic Initiative at academic.signavio.com to access a comprehensive set of teaching material related to this book, and beyond. The material is published under a Creative Commons license, allowing lecturers to use and adapt the exercises according to their syllabi. All figures of this book can be downloaded from bpm-book.com. It is interesting to see that the increasing adoption of business process technology poses interesting challenges to the research community. One of these challenges is to closer relate process models with the actual execution of the business processes. Since about a decade, an impressive body of work IX

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was done in process mining and business process intelligence. There are further topics that have emerged as challenges in real-world settings, such as compliance checking of process models, process model abstraction, and the management of process repositories, where issues like behavioural similarity and indexing of process models are investigated. Unfortunately, a text book on business process management cannot cover all these topics. Still, this second edition contains a number of enhancements and modifications. The increasing importance of the BPMN in Version 2 is matched by extending significantly the respective section in the process orchestrations chapter. I also added a section on BPMN in the process choreographies chapter to discuss the language constructs for expressing process interactions, conversations, and choreographies. A concrete consistency criterion for process orchestrations implementing behavioural interfaces is introduced, which makes the discussion of the consistency property more tangible. In the process properties chapter, I extended the section on data in processes, which now also covers properties of a business process with respect to the data objects it works on. To improve the integration of the business process management methodology with the concepts introduced in the first part of the book, I rewrote the methodology chapter. It now discusses the relationships between business processes in much more detail and it also introduces performance indicators for business processes and concepts on how to measure them. In addition to these extensions of the book, there are many minor changes, which, I hope, will increase its readability and soundness. Quite a number of them were triggered by readers, whose feedback I am happy to acknowledge. Thanks to all members of my research group at HPI; your comments and remarks on earlier versions of this manuscript have helped improving the book. Special thanks to Matthias Kunze and Alexander L¨ ubbe for their feedback, mainly on the BPMN sections. I would also like to thank the Berliner BPM Offensive for providing me with the stencil set of the BPMN shapes. The shapes are much nicer than I could ever do them, they helped a lot! Potsdam, March 2012

M.W.

Preface

The extensive ground covered by business process management is divided between representatives from two communities: business administration and computer science. Due to the increasingly important role of information systems in the realization of business processes, a common understanding of and productive interaction between these communities are essential. Due to different viewpoints, however, the interaction between these communities is seldom seamless. Business administration professionals tend to consider information technology as a subordinate aspect in business process management that experts will take care of. On the other hand, computer science professionals often consider business goals and organizational regulations as terms that do not deserve much thought, but require the appropriate level of abstraction. This book argues that we need to have a common understanding of the different aspects of business process management addressed by all communities involved. Robust and correct realization of business processes in software that increases customer satisfaction and ultimately contributes to the competitive advantage of an enterprise can only be achieved through productive communication between these communities. By structuring business process management, this book aims at providing a step towards a better understanding of the concepts involved in business process management—from the perspective of a computer scientist. If business persons find the book too technical, software people find it too non-technical, and formal persons find it too imprecise, but all of them have a better understanding of the ground covered by our discipline, this book has achieved its goal. The Web site bpm-book.com contains additional information related to this book, such as links to references that are available online and exercises that facilitate the reader’s getting into deeper contact with the topics addressed. Teaching material is also available at that Web site. XI

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This book is based on material used in the business process management lectures that the author has conducted in the Master’s and Bachelor’s program in IT Systems Engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute for IT Systems Engineering at the University of Potsdam. I am thankful for the critical remarks by my students, who encouraged me to shape the content of my lectures, which ultimately led to this book. Many people contributed to this book. First of all, I like to thank my colleague researchers in business process management for developing this area in recent years, most prominently Wil van der Aalst, Alistair Barros, Marlon Dumas, Arthur ter Hofstede, Axel Martens, and Manfred Reichert. The chapter on case handling is based on joint work with Wil van der Aalst and Dolf Gr¨ unbauer. I am grateful to Barbara Weber for her detailled comments on the manuscript that have led to improvements, mainly in the chapter on process orchestrations. I acknowledge the support of the members of my research group at Hasso Plattner Institute. Gero Decker, Frank Puhlmann, and Hilmar Schuschel were involved in the preparation of the assignments of the business process management lectures. Together with Dominik Kuropka and Harald Meyer, they provided valuable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Special thanks to Gero Decker for contributing the first version of the process choreographies chapter. The lion’s share of my acknowledgements goes to my family, and foremost to Daniela. Potsdam, July 2007

M.W.

Contents

Part I Foundation 1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.1 Motivation and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.2 Business Process Lifecycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 1.3 Classification of Business Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 1.4 Goals, Structure, and Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

2

Evolution of Enterprise Systems Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Traditional Application Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Enterprise Applications and their Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Enterprise Modelling and Process Orientation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Workflow Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Enterprise Services Computing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25 26 28 39 49 57 65 67

Part II Business Process Modelling 3

Business Process Modelling Foundation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 3.1 Conceptual Model and Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 3.2 Abstraction Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 3.3 From Business Functions to Business Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 3.4 Activity Models and Activity Instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 3.5 Process Models and Process Instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 3.6 Process Interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 3.7 Modelling Process Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 3.8 Modelling Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 3.9 Modelling Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 3.10 Business Process Flexibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 XIII

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3.11 Architecture of Process Execution Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 4

Process Orchestrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 4.1 Control Flow Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 4.2 Petri Nets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 4.3 Event-driven Process Chains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 4.4 Workflow Nets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 4.5 Yet Another Workflow Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 4.6 Graph-Based Workflow Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200 4.7 Business Process Model and Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

5

Process Choreographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 5.1 Motivation and Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 5.2 Development Phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 5.3 Process Choreography Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 5.4 Process Choreography Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260 5.5 Service Interaction Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 5.6 Let’s Dance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 5.7 Choreography Modelling in BPMN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290

6

Properties of Business Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 6.1 Data Dependencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294 6.2 Object Lifecycle Conformance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 6.3 Structural Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 6.4 Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300 6.5 Relaxed Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 6.6 Weak Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 6.7 Lazy Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318 6.8 Soundness Criteria Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326 Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328

Part III Architectures and Methodologies 7

Business Process Management Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333 7.1 Workflow Management Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333 7.2 Flexible Workflow Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338 7.3 Web Services and their Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 7.4 Advanced Service Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352 7.5 Data-Driven Processes: Case Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 370

Contents

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Business Process Management Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373 8.1 Dependencies between Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373 8.2 Methodology Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376 8.3 Phases in Detail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378 Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399<...