Process modeling

The term process model is used in various contexts. For example, in business process modeling the
enterprise process model is often referred to as the business process model.

Overview
Process models are processes of the same nature that
are classified together into a model. Thus, a process
model is a description of a process at the type level.
Since the process model is at the type level, a process
is an instantiation of it. The same process model is used Abstraction level for processes[1]
repeatedly for the development of many applications
and thus, has many instantiations. One possible use of
a process model is to prescribe how things must/should/could be done in contrast to the process itself which
is really what happens. A process model is roughly an anticipation of what the process will look like. What
the process shall be will be determined during actual system development.[2]

The goals of a process model are to be:

Descriptive
Track what actually happens during a process
Take the point of view of an external observer who looks at the way a process has been
performed and determines the improvements that must be made to make it perform more
effectively or efficiently.
Prescriptive
Define the desired processes and how they should/could/might be performed.
Establish rules, guidelines, and behavior patterns which, if followed, would lead to the
desired process performance. They can range from strict enforcement to flexible
guidance.
Explanatory
Provide explanations about the rationale of processes.
Explore and evaluate the several possible courses of action based on rational
arguments.
Establish an explicit link between processes and the requirements that the model needs
to fulfill.
Pre-defines points at which data can be extracted for reporting purposes.

Purpose
From a theoretical point of view, the meta-process modeling explains the key concepts needed to describe
what happens in the development process, on what, when it happens, and why. From an operational point
of view, the meta-process modeling is aimed at providing guidance for method engineers and application
developers.[1]
The activity of modeling a business process usually predicates a need to change processes or identify issues
to be corrected. This transformation may or may not require IT involvement, although that is a common
driver for the need to model a business process. Change management programmes are desired to put the
processes into practice. With advances in technology from larger platform vendors, the vision of business
process models (BPM) becoming fully executable (and capable of round-trip engineering) is coming closer
to reality every day. Supporting technologies include Unified Modeling Language (UML), model-driven
architecture, and service-oriented architecture.

Process modeling addresses the process aspects of an enterprise business architecture, leading to an all
encompassing enterprise architecture. The relationships of a business processes in the context of the rest of
the enterprise systems, data, organizational structure, strategies, etc. create greater capabilities in analyzing
and planning a change. One real-world example is in corporate mergers and acquisitions; understanding the
processes in both companies in detail, allowing management to identify redundancies resulting in a
smoother merger.

Process modeling has always been a key aspect of business process reengineering, and continuous
improvement approaches seen in Six Sigma.

Classification of process models

By coverage

There are five types of coverage where the term process model has been defined differently:[3]

Activity-oriented: related set of activities conducted for the specific purpose of product
definition; a set of partially ordered steps intended to reach a goal.[4]
Product-oriented: series of activities that cause sensitive product transformations to reach
the desired product.[5]
Decision-oriented: set of related decisions conducted for the specific purpose of product
definition.
Context-oriented: sequence of contexts causing successive product transformations under
the influence of a decision taken in a context.
Strategy-oriented: allow building models representing multi-approach processes and plan
different possible ways to elaborate the product based on the notion of intention and
strategy.[6]

By alignment

Processes can be of different kinds.[2] These definitions "correspond to the various ways in which a process
can be modelled".

Strategic processes
investigate alternative ways of doing a thing and eventually produce a plan for doing it
are often creative and require human co-operation; thus, alternative generation and
selection from an alternative are very critical activities
Tactical processes
help in the achievement of a plan
 are more concerned with the tactics to be adopted for actual plan achievement than with
the development of a plan of achievement
Implementation processes
are the lowest level processes
are directly concerned with the details of the what and how of plan implementation

By granularity

Granularity refers to the level of detail of a process model and affects the kind of guidance, explanation and
trace that can be provided. Coarse granularity restricts these to a rather limited level of detail whereas fine
granularity provides more detailed capability. The nature of granularity needed is dependent on the situation
at hand.[2]

Project manager, customer representatives, the general, top-level, or middle management require rather
coarse-grained process description as they want to gain an overview of time, budget, and resource planning
for their decisions. In contrast, software engineers, users, testers, analysts, or software system architects will
prefer a fine-grained process model where the details of the model can provide them with instructions and
important execution dependencies such as the dependencies between people.

While notations for fine-grained models exist, most traditional process models are coarse-grained
descriptions. Process models should, ideally, provide a wide range of granularity (e.g. Process
Weaver).[2][7]

By flexibility

It was found that while process models were

prescriptive, in actual practice departures from the
prescription can occur.[6] Thus, frameworks for
adopting methods evolved so that systems
development methods match specific organizational
situations and thereby improve their usefulness. The
development of such frameworks is also called
situational method engineering. [8]
Flexibility of Method construction approaches
Method construction approaches can be organized in a
flexibility spectrum ranging from 'low' to 'high'.[8]

Lying at the 'low' end of this spectrum are rigid methods, whereas at the 'high' end there are modular
method construction. Rigid methods are completely pre-defined and leave little scope for adapting them to
the situation at hand. On the other hand, modular methods can be modified and augmented to fit a given
situation. Selecting a rigid methods allows each project to choose its method from a panel of rigid, pre-
defined methods, whereas selecting a path within a method consists of choosing the appropriate path for the
situation at hand. Finally, selecting and tuning a method allows each project to select methods from
different approaches and tune them to the project's needs."[9]

Quality of methods
As the quality of process models is being discussed in this paper, there is a need to elaborate quality of
modeling techniques as an important essence in quality of process models. In most existing frameworks
created for understanding the quality, the line between quality of modeling techniques and the quality of
models as a result of the application of those techniques are not clearly drawn. This report will concentrate
both on quality of process modeling techniques and quality of process models to clearly differentiate the
two. Various frameworks were developed to help in understanding quality of process modeling techniques,
one example is Quality based modeling evaluation framework or known as Q-Me framework which argued
to provide set of well defined quality properties and procedures to make an objective assessment of this
properties possible.[10] This framework also has advantages of providing uniform and formal description of
the model element within one or different model types using one modeling techniques[10] In short this can
make assessment of both the product quality and the process quality of modeling techniques with regard to
a set of properties that have been defined before.

Quality properties that relate to business process modeling techniques discussed in [10] are:

Expressiveness: the degree to which a given modeling technique is able to denote the
models of any number and kinds of application domains.
Arbitrariness: the degree of freedom one has when modeling one and the same domain
Suitability: the degree to which a given modeling technique is specifically tailored for a
specific kind of application domain.
Comprehensibility: the ease with which the way of working and way of modeling are
understood by participants.
Coherence: the degree to which the individual sub models of a way of modeling constitute a
whole.
Completeness; the degree to which all necessary concepts of the application domain are
represented in the way of modeling.
Efficiency: the degree to which the modeling process uses resources such as time and
people.
Effectiveness: the degree to which the modeling process achieves its goal.

To assess the quality of Q-ME framework; it is used to illustrate the quality of the dynamic essentials
modeling of the organisation (DEMO) business modeling techniques.

It is stated that the evaluation of the Q-ME framework to the DEMO modeling techniques has revealed the
shortcomings of Q-ME. One particular is that it does not include quantifiable metric to express the quality
of business modeling technique which makes it hard to compare quality of different techniques in an overall
rating.

There is also a systematic approach for quality measurement of modeling techniques known as complexity
metrics suggested by Rossi et al. (1996). Techniques of Meta model is used as a basis for computation of
these complexity metrics. In comparison to quality framework proposed by Krogstie, quality measurement
focus more on technical level instead of individual model level.[11]

Authors (Cardoso, Mendling, Neuman and Reijers, 2006) used complexity metrics to measure the
simplicity and understandability of a design. This is supported by later research done by Mendling et al.
who argued that without using the quality metrics to help question quality properties of a model, simple
process can be modeled in a complex and unsuitable way. This in turn can lead to a lower
understandability, higher maintenance cost and perhaps inefficient execution of the process in question.[12]
The quality of modeling technique is important in creating models that are of quality and contribute to the
correctness and usefulness of models.

Quality of models
Earliest process models reflected the dynamics of the process with a practical process obtained by
instantiation in terms of relevant concepts, available technologies, specific implementation environments,
process constraints and so on.[13]

Enormous number of research has been done on quality of models but less focus has been shifted towards
the quality of process models. Quality issues of process models cannot be evaluated exhaustively however
there are four main guidelines and frameworks in practice for such. These are: top-down quality
frameworks, bottom-up metrics related to quality aspects, empirical surveys related to modeling techniques,
and pragmatic guidelines.[14]

Hommes quoted Wang et al. (1994)[11] that all the main characteristic of quality of models can all be
grouped under 2 groups namely correctness and usefulness of a model, correctness ranges from the model
correspondence to the phenomenon that is modeled to its correspondence to syntactical rules of the
modeling and also it is independent of the purpose to which the model is used.

Whereas the usefulness can be seen as the model being helpful for the specific purpose at hand for which
the model is constructed at first place. Hommes also makes a further distinction between internal
correctness (empirical, syntactical and semantic quality) and external correctness (validity).

A common starting point for defining the quality of conceptual model is to look at the linguistic properties
of the modeling language of which syntax and semantics are most often applied.

Also the broader approach is to be based on semiotics rather than linguistic as was done by Krogstie using
the top-down quality framework known as SEQUAL.[15][16] It defines several quality aspects based on
relationships between a model, knowledge Externalisation, domain, a modeling language, and the activities
of learning, taking action, and modeling.

The framework does not however provide ways to determine various degrees of quality but has been used
extensively for business process modeling in empirical tests carried out [17] According to previous research
done by Moody et al.[18] with use of conceptual model quality framework proposed by Lindland et al.
(1994) to evaluate quality of process model, three levels of quality[19] were identified:

Syntactic quality: Assesses extent to which the model conforms to the grammar rules of
modeling language being used.
Semantic quality: whether the model accurately represents user requirements
Pragmatic quality: whether the model can be understood sufficiently by all relevant
stakeholders in the modeling process. That is the model should enable its interpreters to
make use of it for fulfilling their need.

From the research it was noticed that the quality framework was found to be both easy to use and useful in
evaluating the quality of process models however it had limitations in regards to reliability and difficult to
identify defects. These limitations led to refinement of the framework through subsequent research done by
Krogstie. This framework is called SEQUEL framework by Krogstie et al. 1995 (Refined further by
Krogstie & Jørgensen, 2002) which included three more quality aspects.

Physical quality: whether the externalized model is persistent and available for the audience
to make sense of it.
 Empirical quality: whether the model is modeled according to the established regulations
regarding a given language.
Social quality: This regards the agreement between the stakeholders in the modeling
domain.

Dimensions of Conceptual Quality framework[20] Modeling Domain is the set of all statements that are
relevant and correct for describing a problem domain, Language Extension is the set of all statements that
are possible given the grammar and vocabulary of the modeling languages used. Model Externalization is
the conceptual representation of the problem domain.

It is defined as the set of statements about the problem domain that are actually made. Social Actor
Interpretation and Technical Actor Interpretation are the sets of statements that actors both human model
users and the tools that interact with the model, respectively 'think' the conceptual representation of the
problem domain contains.

Finally, Participant Knowledge is the set of statements that human actors, who are involved in the modeling
process, believe should be made to represent the problem domain. These quality dimensions were later
divided into two groups that deal with physical and social aspects of the model.

In later work, Krogstie et al.[15] stated that while the extension of the SEQUAL framework has fixed some
of the limitation of the initial framework, however other limitation remain . In particular, the framework is
too static in its view upon semantic quality, mainly considering models, not modeling activities, and
comparing these models to a static domain rather than seeing the model as a facilitator for changing the
domain.

Also, the framework's definition of pragmatic quality is quite narrow, focusing on understanding, in line
with the semiotics of Morris, while newer research in linguistics and semiotics has focused beyond mere
understanding, on how the model is used and affects its interpreters.

The need for a more dynamic view in the semiotic quality framework is particularly evident when
considering process models, which themselves often prescribe or even enact actions in the problem domain,
hence a change to the model may also change the problem domain directly. This paper discusses the quality
framework in relation to active process models and suggests a revised framework based on this.

Further work by Krogstie et al. (2006) to revise SEQUAL framework to be more appropriate for active
process models by redefining physical quality with a more narrow interpretation than previous research.[15]

The other framework in use is Guidelines of Modeling (GoM) [21] based on general accounting principles
include the six principles: Correctness, Clarity deals with the comprehensibility and explicitness (System
description) of model systems. Comprehensibility relates to graphical arrangement of the information
objects and, therefore, supports the understand ability of a model. Relevance relates to the model and the
situation being presented. Comparability involves the ability to compare models that is semantic comparison
between two models, Economic efficiency; the produced cost of the design process need at least to be
covered by the proposed use of cost cuttings and revenue increases.

Since the purpose of organizations in most cases is the maximization of profit, the principle defines the
borderline for the modeling process. The last principle is Systematic design defines that there should be an
accepted differentiation between diverse views within modeling. Correctness, relevance and economic
efficiency are prerequisites in the quality of models and must be fulfilled while the remaining guidelines are
optional but necessary.
The two frameworks SEQUAL and GOM have a limitation of use in that they cannot be used by people
who are not competent with modeling. They provide major quality metrics but are not easily applicable by
non-experts.

The use of bottom-up metrics related to quality aspects of process models is trying to bridge the gap of use
of the other two frameworks by non-experts in modeling but it is mostly theoretical and no empirical tests
have been carried out to support their use.

Most experiments carried out relate to the relationship between metrics and quality aspects and these works
have been done individually by different authors: Canfora et al. study the connection mainly between count
metrics (for example, the number of tasks or splits -and maintainability of software process models);[22]
Cardoso validates the correlation between control flow complexity and perceived complexity; and
Mendling et al. use metrics to predict control flow errors such as deadlocks in process models.[12][23]

The results reveal that an increase in size of a model appears to reduce its quality and comprehensibility.
Further work by Mendling et al. investigates the connection between metrics and understanding [24] and[25]
While some metrics are confirmed regarding their effect, also personal factors of the modeler – like
competence – are revealed as important for understanding about the models.

Several empirical surveys carried out still do not give clear guidelines or ways of evaluating the quality of
process models but it is necessary to have clear set of guidelines to guide modelers in this task. Pragmatic
guidelines have been proposed by different practitioners even though it is difficult to provide an exhaustive
account of such guidelines from practice.

Most of the guidelines are not easily put to practice but "label activities verb–noun" rule has been suggested
by other practitioners before and analyzed empirically. From the research.[26] value of process models is not
only dependent on the choice of graphical constructs but also on their annotation with textual labels which
need to be analyzed. It was found that it results in better models in terms of understanding than alternative
labelling styles.

From the earlier research and ways to evaluate process model quality it has been seen that the process
model's size, structure, expertise of the modeler and modularity affect its overall comprehensibility.[24] [27]
Based on these a set of guidelines was presented[28] 7 Process Modeling Guidelines (7PMG). This
guideline uses the verb-object style, as well as guidelines on the number of elements in a model, the
application of structured modeling, and the decomposition of a process model. The guidelines are as
follows:

G1 Minimize the number of elements in a model

G2 Minimize the routing paths per element
G3 Use one start and one end event
G4 Model as structured as possible
G5 Avoid OR routing elements
G6 Use verb-object activity labels
G7 Decompose a model with more than 50 elements

7PMG still though has limitations with its use: Validity problem 7PMG does not relate to the content of a
process model, but only to the way this content is organized and represented. It does suggest ways of
organizing different structures of the process model while the content is kept intact but the pragmatic issue
of what must be included in the model is still left out. The second limitation relates to the prioritizing
guideline the derived ranking has a small empirical basis as it relies on the involvement of 21 process
modelers only.
This could be seen on the one hand as a need for a wider involvement of process modelers' experience, but
it also raises the question, what alternative approaches may be available to arrive at a prioritizing
guideline?[28]

See also
Model selection
Process (science)
Process architecture
Process calculus
Process flow diagram
Process ontology
Process Specification Language

References
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External links
Modeling processes regarding workflow patterns; link appears to be broken (ftp://ftp.informati
k.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/library/medoc.ustuttgart_fi/STUD-2052/STUD-2052.pdf)
"Abstraction Levels for Processes Presentation: Process Modeling Principles" (https://web.a
rchive.org/web/20110714110528/http://www.modelingconcepts.com/pdf/BPM_V2.pdf)
(PDF). Archived from the original (http://www.modelingconcepts.com/pdf/BPM_V2.pdf)
(PDF) on 2011-07-14. Retrieved 2008-06-12.
American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) (http://www.apqc.org/), a worldwide
organization for process and performance improvement
The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management (http://www.workflowpatterns.com/do
cumentation/documents/vanderaalst98application.pdf), W.M.P. van der Aalst, 1998.

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