Combining Process Modeling and Case Modeling

Abstract

Typical Business Process management approaches cannot deal with unstructured business processes which need to be handled with an high level of flexibility. The increasing need to deal with unstructured processes led to the emergence of the Adaptive Case Management. This new modeling approach bases its foundation on the concept of “case”, and it deals with unexpected situations or human intensive tasks, serving in a much efficient manner the knowledge work requirements. Despite numerous discussion about possible extensions of BPM through the use of ACM, so far there is no satisfactory merge of the two approaches.The Object Management Group (OMG) published the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) as well as the Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) in order to give to organizations common meta-models to graphically express respectively predefined business processes and unpredictable cases.In this research an overview of BPM and ACM is given and the commonalities and the differences between BPMN and CMMN are examined. In a case study a practical example of a process characterized by structured and unstructured activities is analyzed and an integrated meta-model is suggested is suggested. The meta-model is composed by a combination of elements of both BPMN and CMMN which work together in a single business environment. The meta-model is implemented through in the ADOxx environment and evaluated in the use case scenario.