Extending BPMN 2.0 for Modelling the Combination of Activities That Involve Data Constraints

Abstract

The combination of activities to achieve optimal goals sometimes has a complex solution. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0 facilitates the modelling of business processes by providing new artifacts, such as various types of tasks, source of data and relations between tasks. Sometimes, although the order of the activities can be known, the concrete data values that the activities interchange to optimize their behaviour needs to be found, specially when input parameters of an activity affect to the input parameter of the others. Taking into account the lack of priority and clear sequential relationship between the activities of such combination, a deep analysis of possible models and data input values for the activities is necessary. For that reason, an extension of BPMN 2.0 with a new type of sub-process and its associated marker is proposed. The aim of this new sub-process is to define, in an easy way, a combination of several activities to find out, in an automated way, the concrete values of the data handling that optimize an overall objective.