Presentation at the Software Engineering (SE) 2025 in Karlsruhe

At ES25, Tarek Skouti, presented the Role-based Modeling of Business Processes with RBPMN. Traditionally, companies use business process (BP) models to describe and design their organizational processes involving digital entities and humans. Advances in the development of Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) allow companies to expand their BPs into the physical world. While this expansion might contribute to higher degrees of automation and efficiency of an organization’s BPs, it could also negatively affect the complexity of the BP models. Existing BP notations show shortcomings when modeling interactions and responsibilities within modern dynamic processes that involve digital, human, and non-human work performers. In this work, we extend the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN 2.0) standard with a modern understanding of Roles to highlight responsibilities and interactions of entities performing work in BPs. We apply the proposed extension–RBPMN–to BPs in a smart factory context. By using roles we achieve an improved expressiveness for modeling complex and context-sensitive BPs with a high degree of variability to tame complexity.

The underlying journal paper can be accessed on springerlink: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-024-01202-z