Towards a Common Understanding of Business Process Instance Data

In an organisation several Business Process Management System (BPMS) products can co-exist and work alongside each other. Each one of these BPM tools has its own definition of process instances, creating a heterogeneous environment. This reduces interoperability between business process management systems and increases the effort involved in analysing the data. In this paper, we propose a common model for business process instances, named Business Process Instance Model (BPIM), which provides a holistic view of business process instances generated from multiple systems. BPIM consists of visual notations and their metadata schema. It captures three dimensions of process instances: process execution paths, instance data provenance and meta-data. BPIM aims to provide an abstract layer between the process instance repository and BPM engines, leading to common understanding of business process instances.