Extending BPMN with Submit/Response-Style User Interaction Modeling

Developing process-oriented enterprise systems not only asks for Business Process Management (BPM) but also for an appropriate user interface and data model. Current BPM and workflow technologies are neither integrated with user dialogs nor offer an appropriate data model. This paper describes a novel integrated framework for modeling process-oriented systems called Processes with User Interfaces and Data Modeling Integration (PUDI), which offers a solution to these shortcomings. For the projects described in this paper, we used the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) for the processes, extensions to BPMN for submit/response-style user interaction, which is characteristic of form-based applications ranging from small Web applications to large ERP systems, and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for the data model which defines both, the information and the message model. The paper discusses related work and describes real-world application scenarios which motivated our research on the proposed framework and illustrates its practical benefits.