A BPMN Extension to Enable the Explicit Modeling of Task Resources

Business Process Management (BPM) is an holistic approach for describing, analyzing, managing, improving and executing large enterprise business processes, which can be seen as a number of related tasks that have to be executed in order to reach well-defined objectives. This paper introduces an approach to the specification and management of the resources that are associated to each BP task and that are required to support the execution of processes and related complex systems. This work provides a notation to define, at design time, the real entities which will perform the activities at different levels of abstraction, also specifying their non-functional properties. This approach makes use of composition patterns in order to model complex resources into tree structures allowing to represent part-whole hierarchies in a flexible and scalable manner. To accomplish these modeling objectives, the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) has been extended. BPMN is the de-facto standard for the highlevel description of business processes, but does not support the characterization of the business process or related resources in terms of non-functional properties. The proposed extension Performability-enabled BPMN (PyBPMN) is based on an approach that exploits principles and standards introduced by the Model Driven Architecture (MDA), thus obtaining considerable advantages in terms of easy customization and improved automation. PyBPMN has been introduced in our previous contributions for performance and reliability analysis, and has been extended in this work for addressing also complex resource modeling and management. The paper also presents some examples of the proposed extension usage to show how it enables the description of complex resources and their non-functional properties.