Uniform Modeling of Resources and Business Processes Using Business Entities

Most approaches for resource management employ simplistic behavioral models of heterogeneous resources. To fully support the rich interaction between resources and business processes in a real business environment, in this paper we introduce a novel approach where resources are modeled in much the same way that we model business processes. Resources are systematically modeled as full-fledged business entities to capture resource behavior and also the interactions between resources and business processes. A service-oriented resource management architecture is developed to manage resources and support a range of resource allocation patterns and policies. This architecture can be flexibly integrated with BPM applications to enable monitoring resource utilization and optimizing resource allocation. This new approach to modeling resources sheds light on the interplay between business processes and resources.