Two-Stage Process Modeling for Simulation in BPR

This work presents an approach to give business analysts access to the simulation of complex process environments by hiding the complexity and expressive power of Petri nets behind a subset of UML2 activity diagrams. To avoid the complexity to simply shift from the Petri nets into the activity diagrams we introduce a two-stage-scheme for the development of executable Petri net process models: Domain experts develop reusable Petri nets based domain models in the first stage while business analysts develop UML activity diagram based process models that reuse the domain models. The activity diagram process models are transformed into executable Petri nets based process models by utilizing the domain models for process composition. The article describes the conceptual method of the integration of both model types.