Controlling Business Object States in Business Process Models to Support Compliance

The doctoral thesis addresses the existing gap between business process models and states of business objects. Existing modelling methods such as BPMN and ArchiMate lack an explicitly declarative approach for capturing states of business objects and laws of state transitions. This gap hinders the compliance of business process models with regulations imposed internally or externally, and can result in potential legal problems for organizations. Also this gap makes the ability of BPMN and ArchiMate to capture real-world phenomena questionable and drives modellers to employ additional standards and models (e.g., state-machine diagrams). The research goal of the doctoral thesis is to propose a formalized solution for closing the gap between business process models and states of business objects by using Bunge-Wand-Weber model. The solution approach includes means for explicit definition of states of business objects, automatic generation of conceivable state space at a process model design-time, automatic generation of lawful state space, and compliance checking at a process run-time.