Formally Founded Business Process Modeling

Business processes are an established means for eliciting requirements of enterprise information systems. The dissertation introduces description techniques for business processes which are easy to understand intuitively and at the same time are formally well founded. Based on these description techniques, a set of precise criteria defines a notion of well formedness of business process models. Furthermore, transformation rules are specified which in a controlled way enable the evolution of business process models while preserving both syntactic and semantic correctness of the modified model. Thus the dissertation provides the necessary foundations for a modeling tool which, in addition to the usual drawing functionalities, offers powerful automatic consistency checks for the business process models under development.