Towards True Process Descriptions Interoperability

Abstract

The article describes a part of our research in the area of (business) process modeling, analysis and execution. It describes the current state of process languages and standards. It concentrates on the process model interoperability and portability problems, caused because of huge number of process modeling standards, which often do not even target the same conceptual level of process modeling. It provides an idea how to bring together those standards, using process concepts mapping into Petri nets and incorporating the usage of process patterns. Transformation to strictly formal process languages has a potential to prove itself as a fair solution with the following advantages: the number of mappings among different process languages is reduced and the process model can be analyzed using proven Petri Net or general graph algorithms. Development of the approach is still in its early phase. Mapping rules to/from process patterns are neither strictly defined nor trivial, therefore, they will be the main focus of our future research.