Business processes, in particular collaborations, describe how various participants interact and behave to achieve specific objectives. Depending on the business scenario, process participants operate in a specific environment characterized by spatial and contextual dimensions. Participants can interact with and modify the environment, which in turn may influence process execution. Indeed, there exists a bidirectional relationship between business processes and the environment, which involves the necessity of representing the environment in a way that allows business processes to benefit from its awareness. Despite extensive research on environment modeling, the seamless integration of business processes and the environment model is not fully explored yet. To address this gap, we propose a tool for animating environment-aware BPMN collaborations with the aid of geographical maps.
Publications
BPM 2025
- Modeling, Formalizing, and Animating Environment-Aware BPMN Collaborations. In: Business Process Management, pp. To appear, Springer, 2025.
- Flavio Corradini, Luca Mozzoni, Jessica Piccioni, Barbara Re, Lorenzo Rossi, Francesco Tiezzi: Companion technical report of the paper “Modeling, Formalizing, and Animating Environment-Aware BPMN Collaborations”
BPM 2024
- On the Interplay Between BPMN Collaborations and the Physical Environment. In: Business Process Management, pp. 93–110, Springer, 2024, ISSN: 1611-3349.
- BEAR: BPMN and Environment AnimatoR. In: BPM Demonstration Track, 2024.
- Flavio Corradini, Jessica Piccioni, Barbara Re, Lorenzo Rossi, Francesco Tiezzi: Companion technical report of the paper “On the interplay between BPMN collaborations and the physical environment”
The BEAR Animator
BEAR (BPMN Environmental Animator) is a tool that supports the design and animation of environmental BPMN Collaboration diagrams. BEAR guarantees a precise understanding of the interplay between BPMN collaborations and the physical environment through the visualization of the model execution. BEAR gives a comprehensive view of the executions in terms of control- and message-flow token animation on the BPMN collaboration, and participants’ movements in the space model. Moreover, BEAR shows the environment’s evolution. Overall, BEAR animation features are helpful in practical modeling activities, for debugging errors that can arise due to environmental conditions that can influence the process execution.
Screencast video
User Guide
Animation and Debugging with BEAR
BEAR embeds an animator capable of representing step-by-step the environment-aware BPMN collaboration execution. By selecting the Token Simulation button top-left corner, a play button will appear over each fireable start event. Once this button is clicked, one process is activated. This creates a new token in the form of a small colored circle at the start event of the BPMN collaboration and another token in place of the environment model corresponding to the set position of the pool, which starts to cross the two models.
The data panel in the right side of the interface allows users to keep track of the environment evolution throughout the animation. At any time, the animation can be paused by the user to check the distribution of the tokens in the environment and in the BPMN collaboration. The animation terminates once all tokens cannot move forward. In the case of deadlocks or potential deadlock situations, Environment-aware BPMN Animator will highlight the cause using either yellow or red color.
Modeling with BEAR
BEAR embeds a modeler (on the right) used to design the environment model. The environment is modeled in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and overlaid onto a geographic map for enhanced visualization. The designer can define an environment model by drawing physical places and edges directly on a geographic map, however, the underlying place graph can also be visualized.
Each element can be enriched with key-value attributes, either spatial, e.g., length, size or contextual, e.g., room purpose. In addition to the physical layer, the tool supports the definition of a logical layer: Logical places are defined by conditions that predicate over the attributes of physical places. Views are dynamic groupings of logical places that enable reasoning at different levels of abstraction.
BEAR also embeds a user-friendly modeler (on the left) used to design the BPMN collaboration processes. For each element, it is possible to define additional properties using the element palette. One or more environmental attributes can be set for a place in the environmental model by using the associated property panel. In order to define an environmental attribute, it is necessary to define its name and its initial value. Environmental attributes can be referenced by other elements in the models by using the following notation: place_name.attribute_name.
An initial position corresponding to one of the places in the environmental model can be set for each pool, which represents participant in the collaboration.
Tasks in the model will include a new Assignments property used to modify the value of environmental attributes. Assignments are defined by specifying the name of a defined attribute (e.g. place1.temperature) and its new value (e.g. 25). Tasks will also include a Guards property used to assess the value of environmental attributes prior to execution. Guards are defined by specifying the name of a defined attribute (e.g. place1.temperature), a logical operator (e.g. =<) and a value (e.g. 25).
New types of Tasks are also introduced in the modeler:
- Movement Tasks are used to move a participant within the environment, modifying its position. A Destination attribute indicates the place that the participant wants to reach from its current position. The destination has to be defined by selecting one of the places defined in the environmental model or by specifying the name of an attribute that contains the name of a place.
- Binding Tasks and Unbinding Tasks are used to synchronize movements between participants. Movement Tasksperformed after a Binding Task will affect all the bound participants, until they reach the next Unbinding Task.
