A Metamodel-Driven Business Process Modeling Methodology and Its Integrated Environment for Reusing Business Processes

Abstract

Reusing business process models and best practices can improve the productivity, quality and agility in the early development phases of enterprise software systems. To help developers reuse the business process models and best practices, we propose a methodology and an integrated environment for business process modeling driven by the metamodel. Furthermore, we propose a process-template design method to unify the granularity and separate the commonality and variability of business processes so that business process models can be reused across different enterprise software systems. The proposed methodology enables to create reuse-oriented business process templates before the business process modeling. To support the proposed methodology, we developed an integrated environment for creating, reusing and verifying the business process models. As the key techniques, we describe the methodology and its integrated environment, including a metamodel and notations. We applied the methodology and integrated environment to an actual enterprise software development project, and evaluated that the productivity of business process modeling is improved by at least 46%. As the conclusion, this paper contributes to prove the effectiveness of the meta-model driven business process modeling methodology for the reuse of business process models.