Process modeling

Integrating information systems into an enterprise often requires modeling even the manual organizational processes into which these systems intervene. Three such applications - business process reengineering, coordination technology, and process-driven software development environments - share a growing requirement to represent the processes through which work is accomplished. To the extent that automation is involved, process representation becomes a vital issue in redesigning work and allocating responsibilities between humans and computers. The basic uses for process models are: 1. to facilitate human understanding and communication, 2. to support process improvement, 3. to automate execution support, 4. to automate process guidance, and 5. to support process management. Since software specification and programming languages provide a means for representing, reasoning about, and enacting a computational process, most researchers have started from this language base in modeling software processes.