Temporal specification of business processes through project planning tools

Abstract

Business Process Management has gained importance within organizations due to the need to streamline their operations. Nevertheless, despite the existence of process modeling standards such as BPMN, nowadays it is difficult to specify complex temporal constraints and relationships among tasks of a given process, which prevents the specification and subsequent automation of processes where these restrictions are relevant. To solve the exposed difficulty, we have resorted to the project planning and management field, developing a BPMN equivalency of all temporal constraints and relationships that can be specified in a standard project planning tool: Microsoft Project. This not only enables a simple interface for specifying complex temporal restrictions in business processes, but also defines an execution semantic for the models developed in the field of project planning, allowing their later automation through process execution engines