A State Transition Model for Business Processes Towards Object-oriented Business Process Automation

This paper develops a new model for business processes, called State Transition Model. According to this model, a business process instance starts in some state, then flows, not necessarily sequentially, through zero or more intermediate states, until it is terminated in one of the states. The State Transition Model isolates the workflow part of a process from the non-workflow parts. The State Transition Model facilitates object-oriented design of business processes. It results in a top-down approach to human-centric business process automation. This is in contrast to the popular BPMN model, which results in a bottom-up approach.