INVITED TALK (abstract):
Business Process Modeling
Ivo Vondrak
Department of Computer Science
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
VSB - Technical University of Ostrava
Process modeling and workflow applications have become more and more important during last decade. The main reason for this increased interest is the need to provide computer aided system integration of the enterprise based on its business processes. This need requires a technology that enables to integrate modeling, simulation and enactment of processes into one single package. The primary focus of all tools is to describe the way how activities are ordered in time. This kind of partially ordered steps shows how the output of one activity can serve as the input to another one. But there is also another aspect of the business process that has to be involved - where the activities are executed. The spatial aspect of the process enactment represents a new dimension in the process engineering discipline. It is also important to understand that not just process enactment but also the early phases of process specification have to cope with this spatial aspect. The presentation is going to discuss the history of methods used for purpose of business modeling, informal and formalized approach and how the tools based on Petri Nets can be extended with the above mentioned spatial dimension.