Exploiting Web Technologies to Connect Business Process Management and Engineering

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard can be used for representing low-level simulation and automation workflows for scientific, engineering and manufacturing processes. This paper focuses on removing the main obstacles that limit a more widespread adoption of the standard and the related technology: collaboration and data management. Web technologies can provide the necessary complementary features to the BPMN editing and execution activities: real-time collaboration, accessibility, information and expertise sharing. The proposed prototype mimics a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform offering public community support and a private working area which can be shared in real-time with other users. The prototype includes an execution engine the implementation of which has been tailored to support the data structures required by scientific and engineering applications. The ideas presented in this paper are supported by three use cases: a Multi Disciplinary Optimization case (which is a typical engineering-domain problem involving the design of complex items), a collaborative decision-making scenario (the negotiation process for generating a lecture timetable at a university) and Lego-like decomposition of an optimization algorithm (its constituent elements can be easily re-assembled and shared with our platform).