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4. Example of a compound model
The following example is aimed to depict the idea of a compound model. It presents a business process of ordering and manufacturing windows (please note, “windows” here are understood as “window products”, the openings in walls). More specifically, the model illustrates all important stages of the production process, from the acceptance of an offer for windows, through the completion of components and raw materials and finally, shipment of the windows to the customer. An example BPMN process diagram (fig. 3) has many data objects. Three of them − an offer, an order and a contract − have also states that depict how the objects are updated within the process. The presented compound model is composed of the following diagrams: a process diagram (fig. 3), a complementary class diagram (fig. 4) and three derived state machine diagrams (fig. 5).
The BPMN process diagram (fig. 3) has three lanes for three parties involved in the process: a customer, a point of sale and a manufacturer. Due to the fact that we want to model the interaction between the parts explicitly, they have been classified as participants. In order to make the example easily readable, some simplifications of the real process have been adopted. First of all, the process describes an internal point of sale of the manufacturer and its interaction with the customer. It often happens in reality that manufactures apart from the internal points of sale also have a distributed network of the external dealers, who sell final products to customers. To support this situation,
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the process should be extended by additional communication and the accounting of payments using, for example, trade credits and individual discounts for different dealers.
This would require introducing additional data objects and additional state machine diagrams related to the BPMN process model. Another simplified element of the diagram is a process of gathering information about all windows that should be produced, e.g. their dimensions, features and additional requirements. In many cases, dealers measure windows by themselves and the role of the customer is reduced to only making it possible to conduct all the necessary measurements on a construction site. A simplification was applied also in the process of gathering and selecting the production orders. The diagram presents only a general view on the production orders and the further steps leading to a final product. The production of windows is presented as a sub-process. The decision how to organize, optimize and select production orders before sending them to the production and the organization of the production are beyond the scope of the diagram.
These and other simplifications were adopted in order to improve the overall understanding of the BPMN model with the aim of not changing the real process much.
In practice, every window manufacturer produces and organizes the production and sale differently because there are many possible solutions depending on many internal and external factors. The main reasons for different organizations are: the available machinery park, the organization of the sales, choice of the profile materials (PVC, aluminum or wood), historical decisions, the region and habits of employees.
Some data objects introduced in the BPMN process diagram also appear in the UML class diagram, which provides the additional information. Let us consider an offer.
The data object Offer from fig. 3 has its counterpart class named Offer in fig. 4. The class has not only the internal attributes and operations but also the associations to other classes in the diagram. Class associations, which can be adorned with role names, ownership indicators, multiplicity, visibility, and other properties, significantly increase the amount of information available for the data objects which are specified just by a name with an optional status on BPMN process diagrams. Moreover, BPMN process diagrams describe services in terms of sequence of processes and messages that flow between the participants in different activities. In the example, a customer and a point of sale pools exchange message flows and the Offer data object is associated with tasks and sub-process within the pools. More details are provided on a class diagram, where we can see that many sellers may work in a concrete point of sale (Seller class has an attribute worksInPointOfSale), but a concrete Offer will be prepared by one specific Seller. These additional information may later be used to design better user interfaces. It also has a pragmatic aspect as the compound model can be easier understood than the standalone BPMN process diagram.
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Figure 3. Example of the compound model: a BPMN process diagram.
84 From Requirements to Software: Research and Practice
Figure 4. Example of the compound model: a UML class diagram.
Figure 5. Example of the compound model: UML state machine diagrams.
5. Conclusions
The first part of the Chapter introduces an approach to business modeling that is based on the integration of BPMN process diagrams with UML class diagrams and UML state machine diagrams. The diagrams are interrelated and together constitute the compound model. The second part of the Chapter presents an example of the compound model with the explanation of the benefits of using the described approach.
The proposed compound BPMN process diagram and the illustrating example give rise to the question: “How to build such compound diagrams?”. As it is clear from the review of the literature, there is no commonly accepted way of business modeling. The
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main causes are a huge variety of scope and way of presenting of information, which are the basis for business modeling.
Usually the information is provided in the form of written or electronic documents in a variety of ways associated with the described area. On the one hand, these documents may contain information irrelevant to the modeled areas, on the other hand they may not contain all the necessary information. Therefore, usually at the beginning of the modeling an overview of important concepts is done. This overview forms a glossary of terms representing these concepts. Before further modeling steps all terms from the glossary should be validated. Next, what is often applied in practice, first a class diagram and then a process diagram are created. The class diagram represents the concepts from the glossary with the relationships among them. This justifies why class diagrams are proposed for compound BPMN process models. In the alternative proceeding, first a process diagram and then a class diagram are created. Both sequences of diagram derivations do justify the usefulness of the class diagrams in the proposed compound BPMN process models. Attaching state machine diagrams to the model is now a natural consequence of the presence of class diagrams.
It should be underlined that the compound models, contrary to the usual BPMN models, comprise both entirely static and dynamic aspects of the business domain.
It is also worth noting that the compound model could be particularly justified when we have a specific domain ontology providing basic information about the mode-led domain. All ontologies take into account the static aspect and only a few additionally take into account the dynamic aspect. In this situation, creation of a class diagram as the first one is strongly justified.
The outlined approach to business modeling based on the proposed compound model requires further research. The first practical task seems to be developing a tool supporting edition and controlling integrity of the compound model. Optionally, it would be expected to have a tool supporting the verification of the correctness of the compound models against the domain with the use of the domain ontologies. Similarly, in [6] it is suggested that knowledge from the ontologies should be transferred to the software applications. More precisely, it is recommended that a method and a tool for automatic transformation of selected fragments of domain ontology directly to models should be developed.
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