BPIM: A Multi-view Model for Business Process Instances

Business process management has grown into a mature discipline supported by a large number of commercial and open source products, collectively referred to as Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). Because most of the business processes are long-running, any data relating to a running instance of a business process need to persist in a data storage. In an organisation several BPMS products can co-exist and work along side each other. Each one of these BPMS tools has its own definition of process instances, creating a heterogeneous environment. This reduces interoperabilities between business process management systems and increases the effort involved in analysing the data. In this paper, we propose a multi-view business process instance model (BPIM) which provides a holistic view of business process instance. BPIM has three dimensions; process execution path, process instance meta-data and process instance data. This model aims to provide an abstract layer between the data storage and BPM engines, leading to common understanding of what is involved in storing business process instance data.