BPMN Extension Profiles -- Adapting the Profile Mechanism for Integrated BPMN Extensibility

Abstract

BPMN is one of the most prevalent modeling languages within the field of enterprise modeling and constitutes as de facto standard for business process modeling. BPMN provides explicit capabilities for extending the vocabulary of the language. While a range of BPMN extensions evolved during the last years, only very few of them conduct the extension mechanism. Instead, the vast majority of extensions is designed in an ad-hoc manner and lacks in conformity to the BPMN standard, what hampers interoperability, extension integration and model reuse. We suppose, that some architectural shortcomings and barriers of the extension mechanism itself provoke missing application. For instance, BPMN reveals abstraction conflicts and inaccuracies within the extension design. The extension mechanism also lacks in regard of exactly specifying those elements that are extended. Further, the exchange of both the concrete syntax and serialized extended model data remains vague. We therefore present an adaptation of the well-established profile mechanism from the UML Infrastructure in order to facilitate a straightforward definition of the abstract syntax for BPMN extensions. Additionally, the definition of the concrete syntax is supported by an instantiation of OMG's Diagram Definition (DD) specification in order to provide an integrated extension definition and exchange specification. The migration of existing, standard-conform BPMN extensions is outlined by a transformation process.