Preface

This volume contains the papers presented at the first international workshop on Model-based Business Process Engineering, held at King's College London in April 2012.

The fields of Model-based Engineering (MBE) and Business Process Modeling (BPM) have many synergies and potential relationships, with process notations such as Petri Nets and Activity Diagrams being used in both fields to model processes and workflows, and model transformations being used to map Platform-independent models to Platform-specific models (in MBE) and to map one workflow models in one notation to models in another notation (in BPM)

This workshop was organised to investigate more substantial integrations of the concepts of MBE and BPM. We consider that this combination of fields should be named as “Model-based Business Process Engineering” to denote the use of MBE techniques to construct, transform, migrate and translate business process models. Under such an approach, we include, for example, business analysts creating Framework-independent business process models, then using model transformation tools to map these to Framework-specific models in frameworks such as PMBOK or PRINCE-2.

Model-based engineering techniques could also be applied to check the consistency of different business process models, to identify potential workflow patterns within a model, or to check the conformance of a business process model to a framework. In general, MBE provides the benefits of automation, repeatability and abstraction to BPM, helping to produce more consistent, flexible and reusable business process models.