A Role-Based Framework for Business Process Modeling

Business objects are object-oriented representations of the concepts of interest in an organization, such as activities, resources and actors. Business objects collaborate with one another in order to achieve business goals, showing 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. However, most approaches to business process modeling do not separate the collaborative aspects of a business object from its internal aspects. To cope with such issues, this paper makes use of role modeling to separate these concerns while increasing the understandability and reusability of business process models. This 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.