State-Oriented Business Process Modeling: Principles, Theory and Practice

Abstract

Abstract: The progress in both modern IS development and business development in a high degree depends on our ability to understand, model, and control business processes. An approach to business process modeling and control is proposed based on the hypothesis that the ideas worked out in the Mathematical system theory for modeling and controlling physical processes can be successfully used for modeling and controlling business processes. One of the main ideas of mathematical system theory is to consider a process as a set of valid trajectories in a state space, and this idea is the keystone for the approach proposed. The paper discusses (a) how to represent a state of a business process, (b) how to represent direction of movement and speed in the state space, and (c) what type of formalism might be suitable for defining possible trajectories in the state space. The paper also overviews practical application of the the state-oriented approach. The method was tested in preparation of more than ten models of real business processes, and several support system has already been built based on it. The results presented in the paper summarize theoretical and experimental work mainly completed in an environment (a consulting company) that gave a possibility to observe the object of modeling, i.e., business processes, in its natural form, and test the results in practice.

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