Modeling Human Aspects of Business Processes --- A View-Based, Model-Driven Approach

Human participation in business processes needs to be addressed in process modeling. BPEL4People with WS-HumanTask covers this concern in the context of BPEL. Bound to specific workflow technology this leads to a number of problems. Firstly, maintaining and migrating processes to new or similar technologies is expensive. Secondly, the low-level, technical standards make it hard to communicate the process models to human domain experts. Model-driven approaches can help to easier cope with technology changes, and present the process models at a higher level of abstraction than offered by the technology standards. In this paper, we extend the model-driven approach with a view-based framework for business process modeling, in which models can be viewed at different abstraction levels and different concerns of a model can be viewed separately. Our approach enables developers to work with meta-models that represent a technical view on the human participation, whereas human domain experts can have an abstract view on human participation in a business process. In order to validate our work, a mapping to BPEL4People technology will be demonstrated.