Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

In modern organisations business process modelling has become fundamental due to theincreasing rate of organisational change. As a consequence, an organisation needs tocontinuously redesign its business processes on a regular basis. One major problemassociated with the way business process modelling (BPM) is carried out today is thelack of explicit and systematic reuse of previously developed models. Enabling the reuse of previously modelled behaviour can have a beneficial impact on the quality andefficiency of the overall information systems development process and also improve the effectiveness of an organisation’s business processes. In related disciplines, like software engineering, patterns have emerged as a widely accepted architectural mechanism for reusing solutions. In business process modelling the use of patterns is quite limited apart from few sporadic attempts proposed by the literature. Thus, pattern-based BPM is not commonplace. Business process patterns should ideally be discovered from the empirical analysis of organisational processes. Empiricism is currently not the basis for the discovery of patterns for business process modelling and no systematic methodology for collecting and analysing process models of business organisations currently exists.The purpose of the presented research project is to develop a methodological framework for achieving reuse in BPM via the discovery and adoption of patterns. The framework is called Semantic Discovery and Reuse of Business Process Patterns (SDR). SDRprovides a systematic method for identifying patterns among organisational data assetsrepresenting business behaviour. The framework adopts ontologies (i.e., formalisedconceptual models of real-world domains) in order to facilitate such discovery. Theresearch has also produced an ontology of business processes that provides theunderlying semantic definitions of processes and their constituent parts. The use ofontologies to model business processes represents a novel approach and combinesadvances achieved by the Semantic Web and BPM communities. The methodologicalframework also relates to a new line of research in BPM on declarative businessprocesses in which the models specify what should be done rather than how to‘prescriptively’ do it. The research follows a design science method for designing andevaluating SDR. Evaluation is carried out using real world sources and reuse scenariostaken from both the financial and educational domains.