Towards enhancing business process modeling formalisms of EKD with consistency consideration

Abstract

The Enterprise Knowledge Development (EKD) method promotes a holistic approach in Enterprise Modeling and advocates that a single modeling perspective (product, activity or role) is not sufficient for describing business processes. Instead, it offers a set of modeling formalisms, namely actor-role, role-activity, and business objects formalisms, in order to capture the knowledge on enterprise processes view from different perspectives. On the one hand, this strengthens modeling complex business processes, but on the other hand this sets the requirement for dealing with the consistency among those models describing the same business process according to different perspectives. The systematic literature review we have conducted showed, among its findings, that there is no modeling tool supporting all these formalisms, and hence no way was proposed to handle their consistency. In multi-perspective modeling, the quality of the created models and their capability to be involved in the “design by reuse” depend strongly on the consistency among them. This paper aims to enhance the syntactic and semantic quality of EKD business process models by proposing a set of consistency rules controlling their dependencies. As the definition of semantic consistency rules is far from obvious, we have modeled and investigated a plethora of business processes from different domains. Our proposal is then supported by a tool in order to promote an automated consistency handling and hence to save the time and efforts of process modelers.