Business Process Modeling for Industrial Internet Application via BPMN Extension

Business process modeling is widely used in modern organizations for business description. Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), as a de-facto modeling standard, represents business process models in graphical notations. Nevertheless, BPMN lacks intuitive modeling tasks for Industrial Internet application scenarios (e.g., IoT tasks and multi-instance tasks with constraints). Although there are some works on extending BPMN elements to improve the model representation, most of them stay in the conceptual model only without tool support, or they are confined to specific domains. In this paper, we extend both BPMN elements and attributes for application in the Industrial Internet context, and two modeling tools are implemented in a client version and Web version to support business process modeling via low-code, enabling the BPMN extension model from conceptual to executable level. Two real-world case studies in Industrial Internet are conducted to show the usefulness of process models with BPMN extension. Furthermore, a comprehensive user experiment is conducted to evaluate the extended process models and tools, and the experimental results show that process models with extension have better quality compared with traditional process models and provided tools are effective for business process modeling in Industrial Internet applications. Note to Practitioners-This article was motivated by the problem of business process modeling for Industrial Internet. Practically, existing methods extend BPMN elements and add text annotations to enhance the representation of process models. Although these methods facilitate process participants to understand the process models in detail, most of them focus on conceptual modeling and increase the complexity of process models. Moreover, the process models and multi-instance business constraints of business processes involving IoT elements are difficult to be represented by using native BPMN. This article proposes a comprehensive business process modeling language, named BPMN++, which extend both new modeling elements for Industrial Internet business requirements and attributes for BPMN multi-instance tasks with the corresponding graphical notations. Then, BPMN++ model could be executed on the process engine, enabling the model from conceptual to executable level. Finally, comprehensive experiments are conducted for BPMN++.