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Chapter 13
The Business Process Modeling Notation

Gero Decker, Remco Dijkman, Marlon Dumas,
and Luciano Garc´ıa-Ba˜ nuelos

13.1 Introduction

Business processes may be analyzed and designed at different levels of abstraction.
In this respect, it is common to distinguish between business process models
intended for business analysis and improvement, and those intended for automa-
tion by means, for example, of a workflow engine such as YAWL. At the business
analysis level, stakeholders focus on strategic and tactical issues such as cost, risks,
resource utilization, and other nonfunctional aspects of process models. At the
automation level, stakeholders are interested in making their models executable,
which entails the need to provide detailed specifications of data types, data extrac-
tion and conversion steps, application bindings, resource allocation, and distribution
policies, among others.
The requirements for process modeling notations at these two levels of abstrac-
tion are significantly different. This in turn has resulted in different languages
being advocated at the business analysis level and at the execution level. Common
languages used at the business analysis level include flowcharts, UML activity dia-
grams, the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), and Event-driven Process
Chains (EPCs). In this chapter, we consider BPMN, and specifically, version 1.0 of
the BPMN standard specification.
In general, the main purpose of BPMN models is to facilitate communication
between domain analysts and to support decision-making based on techniques such
as cost analysis, scenario analysis, and simulation. However, BPMN models are
also used as a basis for specifying software system requirements, and in such cases,
they are handed over to software developers. This handover raises the following
question: How can developers fully exploit BPMN process models produced by
domain analysts?
One way to achieve a seamless handover is by transforming, either manually
or automatically, business process models obtained from business analysis (e.g.,

G. Decker (B )
Signavio, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: gero.decker@signavio.com

A.H.M. ter Hofstede et al. (eds.), Modern Business Process Automation, 347
DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-03121-2 13, c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010