Using Roles and Business Objects to Model and Understand Business Processes

摘要

Business process modeling focus on describing how business activities interact and relate with other business objects while sustaining the organization's strategy. Business objects are object-oriented representations of organizational concepts of interest, such as resources and actors, which collaborate with one another in order to achieve business goals. However, these objects exhibit different behavior and properties according to each specific collaboration context. This means the same business object may be perceived differently depending on the business objects it is collaborating with. Approaches to business process modeling do not clearly separate the multiple collaborative aspects of a business object from its internal aspects, making difficult to understand objects which are used in different contexts and hindering reuse. To cope with such issues, this paper proposes using role modeling to separate these concerns to increase the understandability and reusability of business process models.The approach makes use of object-oriented concepts to separate a business process model into a business object model and a role model. The business object models deals with specifying the structure and intrinsic behavior of business objects while the role model specifies its collaborative aspects.