Peter Y. H. Wong, Jeremy Gibbons. A Process Semantics for BPMN. In Shaoying Liu, T. S. E. Maibaum, Keijiro Araki, editors, Formal Methods and Software Engineering, 10th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, ICFEM 2008, Kitakyushu-City, Japan, October 27-31, 2008. Proceedings. Volume 5256 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 355-374, Springer, 2008. [doi]
Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), developed by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), intends to bridge the gap between business process design and implementation. However, the specification of the notation does not include a formal semantics. This paper shows how a subset of the BPMN can be given a process semantics in Communicating Sequential Processes. Such a semantics allows developers to formally analyse and compare BPMN diagrams. A simple example of a business process is included to demonstrate the application of the semantics; some theoretical results about the semantics are briefly discussed.