A MDE-based framework to improve the process management: The EMPOWER project

Today's world economic situation is ruled by issues such as reducing cost, improving quality, maximizing profit and improving and optimizing production processes at any kind of organization. In this context, BPM (Business Processes Management) can be an essential strategy. However, there are business situations where is necessary to define innovation solutions to apply BPM in a proper way (e.g., needs of interoperability between process modeling languages, mechanisms to generate the executable model of the process maintaining the traceability with the definition model of the process, mechanisms to manage the measurement of processes from early stages, etc.). This paper describes and analysis some of these situations and proposes a framework based on MDE (Model-Driven Engineering) to support these needs. This MDE-based framework is also supported by the EMPOWER platform which has been developed in an innovation project carried out by Servinform Company and our research group (IWT2, University of Seville, Spain). This platform allows applying advanced MDE techniques to improve the application of BPM in business environments.