Chapter 5 Building a Collaborative Business Process Model

Understanding Top-Level Diagram and Top-Level Process in a Collaborative BPM

Top level-diagram

When you create a collaborative BPM, you must always have a top-level diagram defined under a model or a package. It represents the subject of the process model, and sets the model scope and orientation.

The top-level diagram should only contain:

Atomic transactions between two partners (Business Transaction)
Collaborations between two partners (Binary Collaboration)
Collaborations between several partners (Multiparty Collaboration)

For more information on Business Transaction and Binary and Multiparty Collaboration, see section Understanding the Key Concepts of the ebXML BPSS.

To design these concepts, you use the following PowerDesigner objects:

Top-level processes
Organization units
Role associations

For more information on organization units and role associations, see sections Defining organization units and Defining role associations in chapter Defining an Analysis BPM.

All other tools are grayed out in the Palette, except for the package.

In a collaborative BPM, organization units are always displayed using the icon representation to designate a user of a process that is engaged in a collaboration with a partner. The role association object is used to define the link with the process.

The swimlane representation can only be used in diagrams contained in composite processes to ease the definition of invoking or invoked partners for processes associated with operations.

For more information on how to associate a process with an operation, see section Defining processes in an executable BPM in chapter Building an executable BPM: Managing Data and Orchestration.

V9 models
Extended dependencies you used to a link an organization unit to a process in order to express a binary collaboration are automatically replaced with role association objects.

Top-level process

The top-level process is defined in a top-level diagram and can be a global service that does not belong to a graph but describes its behavior in a sub-graph (a stand alone composite process defined at the package level) using atomic activities and orchestration elements.

In a collaborative model, the top-level process can design:

An atomic transaction between two partners
A Binary Collaboration between two partners that involves the invocation of one or a sequence of Business Transactions
A Collaboration between several partners that involves the invocation of several Binary Collaborations

For more information on atomic activities and orchestration elements, see section Defining processes in an executable BPM in chapter Building an executable BPM: Managing Data and Orchestration see section.