Chapter 9 Working with Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)

Introducing to BPMN Process Language

BPMN 1.0 (Business Process Modeling Notation) is a standardized graphical notation for modeling business processes. It has two main goals:

Provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts to the technical developers, and finally, to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes.
Create a standardized bridge for the gap between the business process design and XML-based business execution languages, such as BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) or Sybase Integration Orchestrator.

The BPMN process language belongs to the Analysis family but is also designed in the direction of process execution in engine, however it has no generation and reverse functions and the following objects are not available when designing a BPMN business process model:

Service provider, service interface, operation, and XSD document
Message format
Data and data access
Variable, correlation
Role association
Synchronization

Beside, BPMN specifies the following kinds of events with their graphical notation. An event is an interruption in the normal execution of the process:

Event name	Event graphical notation
Start
Intermediate (occurs while the process is executed)
End

When to work with BPMN?

When you decide to use the BPMN logical process language, you want to design the decomposition and choreography of tasks at a business level but generally you also already know which platform you are going to use to execute your processes. Indeed, BPMN allows business processes to be mapped to XML-based business execution languages such as BPEL4WS or Sybase Integration Orchestrator.

You can afterwards use the Change Target feature or the Model to Model Generation feature to change to the appropriate platform or language.

For more information on the Change Target feature, see section Changing the process language of a BPM in chapter Business process Model Basics.

For more information on the Model to Model generation feature, see the Generating Other Models from a BPM chapter.