From Attribute Relationship Diagrams to Process (BPMN) and Decision (DMN) Models

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a well established standard for modeling and managing process knowledge of organizations. Recently, the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard has been proposed as a complementary technique to enact particular type of knowledge, namely the organizational rules (decision logic). An integrated model of processes and rules may bring numerous benefits to the knowledge management systems, but the modeling process itself is not a trivial task. To this end, methods that facilitate prototyping and semi-automatic construction of the integrated model are of great importance. In this paper, we propose a method for generating business processes with decisions in BPMN+DMN standards, using a prototyping method called ARD. We present an algorithm that, starting from an ARD model, generates an executable process model along with decision specification. Such a model can be treated as a structured rule base that provides explicit inference flow determined by the process control flow.