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BPMN

Business Process Modeling Notation ( BPMN) is a modeling language. It expresses data flows, actor interaction, and internal process logic and process states.

“BPMN is a graphical flowchart language that can be used by business analysts or developers to represent a business process in an intuitive visual form. Stephen White of IBM wrote Version 1.0 of the specification.”(Havey, 2005: 143)

An analyst employs BPMN for graphical design of their model. This modeling notation in a nutshell contains the start and end even along with processes and tasks inside the modeling domain. A developer presents through a surveyable modeling language, the design of activities and their relation with tasks inside a model.

An event is the first element of BPMN in which a process will be triggered and has a small shape of circle. These events are in three various forms such as: start, intermediate and end. There are different types of event such as:

·	Basic: The event is triggered by a process ·	Message: The message event start the process ·	Timer: the intermediate timer event can be in form of expires, interrupt or escalate an activity ·	Rule: It is a condition defined by an activity ·	Exception: it throws or catches an error ·	Cancellation: It cancels an activity ·	Compensation: Performs a compensating action ·	Link: Starts an event and connect it with an activity ·	Multiple: A series of triggers that can start the process ·	Termination: End all activities in the process.

BPMN activities are tasks, compensation, collapsed sub process, multiple instances, loop, Ad hocs. This modeling notation also has multiple gateways such as: exclusive data based, exclusive event based, inclusive, complex and parallel gateway. The sequence and message flow sends information from one task to the other. A basic BPMN starts with an event which contains one or series of activities and end event.

A BPMN may not be a perfect notation for system developers to design their models. However it can be surveyable for some to design their processes, activities and flow of information through this modeling language.

References:

Michael Havey, 2005, “ Essential Business process Modeling”, O’Reilly Media, Inc. Sebastopol, CA 95427, ISBN: 0-596-00843-0