Applying Activity Patterns for Developing an Intelligent Process Modeling Tool

Due to their high level of abstraction and their reusability, workflow patterns are increasingly attracting the interest of both BPM researchers and BPM tool vendors. Frequently, process models can be assembled out of a set of recurrent business functions (e.g., task execution request, approval, notification), each of them having generic semantics that can be described as activity pattern. To our best knowledge, so far, there has been no extensive work implementing such activity patterns in a process modeling tool. In this paper we present an approach for modeling business processes and workflows. It is based on a suite which, when being implemented in a process modeling tool, allows to design business processes based on well-defined (process) activity patterns. Our suite further provides support for analysing and verifying certain properties of the composed process models (e.g., absence of deadlocks and livelocks). Finally, our approach considers both business processes designed from scratch and processes extracted from legacy systems.