Defining and Analysing Resource Assignments in Business Processes with RAL

Abstract

Business process (BP) modelling notations tend to stray their attention from (human) resource management, unlike other aspects such as control flow or even data flow. They not only offer little intuitive languages to assign resources to BP activities, but neither link BPs with the structure of the organization where they are used, so BP models can easily contain errors such as the assignment of resources that do not belong to the organizational model. In this paper we address this problem and define RAL (Resource Assignment Language), a domainspecific language explicitly developed to assign resources to the activities of a BP model. RAL makes BPs aware of organizational structures. Besides, RAL semantics is based on an OWL-DL ontology, which enables the automatic analysis of resource assignment expressions, thus allowing the extraction of information from the resource assignments, and the detection of inconsistencies and assignment conflicts.