Applying an MDA-based approach for enhancing the validation of business process models

Abstract

Business process modeling is a key activity during the development of complex and large information systems, such as enterprise management systems. These systems deal with a wide number of business processes; thus, the modeling and validation of processes becomes a challenging task. This entails dealing with issues such as the precedence between tasks and activities within a process, as well as resources, roles and enterprise assets involved. Moreover, undetected mistakes in this phase will be propagated to the system design phase and consequently will have a negative effect in the final system quality. On the other hand, the scientific literature advocates the suitability of formal models to address some issues during the process modeling. However, the adoption of formal models leads to new problems because formal languages are difficult to understand and process stakeholders usually lack of knowledge about them. In that direction, the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) paradigm includes specifications that may alleviate some difficulties in the adoption of formal languages. Hence, in this paper we introduce an approach which combines MDA-specifications and ontologies to support process modeling. These technologies have great acceptance between both software researchers and developers. The use of ontologies permits to semantically validate the models. Furthermore, the application of MDA-guidelines could facilitate the integration of BPMN, a graphical notation for describing business process models widely accepted among business analysts, with a formal language to automate the analysis of business process models.