Towards the Mapping of Multidimensional BPMN Models to Process Definition Standards

Business Process Management (BPM) community has accepted Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) as de facto business process modeling standard. In this research BPMN is chosen as the notation for representation of multidimensional business processes, as it uses the set of graphical elements that can be refined with specific attributes, allowing to describe every important aspect of the business process, which can be regarded as the modeling dimension. However, BPMN is only graphical notation and does not support the essence of BPM – full business process lifecycle support: from documenting and modeling to execution and monitoring. To accelerate the adoption of BPM, industry has come forward with two BPMN complementing standards – Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and XML Process Definition Language (XPDL). These two standards are used for different purposes – BPEL is process execution language and XPDL is process exchange language. The problem of mapping BPMN models to BPEL and XPDL is covered in various sources. This paper addresses the issue of mapping BPMN process models in different dimensions to BPEL and XPDL and explores how the structure of BPEL and XPDL is affected after the process is transformed to another dimension. The findings during experiments accomplished in this research can contribute to the creation of the guidelines of how BPMN model in different dimensions can be executed using BPEL or interchanged between different modelling tools