BPMN Profile for Operational Requirements

Abstract

An important aspect of systems and products is how they interact with their environment, including how they are operated. Behaviors external to systems usually involve people not trained in the details of how systems are designed and built, but who need to specify or at least understand the procedures they will be performing. People involved in external behaviors prefer dierent languages for specifying and learning about procedures than languages used by engineers designing the systems themselves. Significant ineciency arises when these languages are not integrated. An emerging trend is for external behaviors to be defined in the Business Process Model and Notation, especially operational requirements, while system designs are specified in the Unified Modeling Language, or extensions to it, such as the Systems Modeling Language. This paper describes an integration of BPMN and UML as standardized by the Object Management Group, providing a detailed comparison of what the languages imply for physical systems and individual people involved in operation, maintenance, and other activities.