A formal framework for business process modelling and design

We present a formal framework for enterprise and business process modelling. The concepts of our framework (objectives and goals, roles and actors, actions and processes, responsibilities and constraints) allow business analysts to capture enterprise knowledge in a way that is both intuitive and mathematically formal. We also outline the basic steps of a methodology that allows business analysts to produce detailed, formal specifications of business processes from high-level enterprise objectives. The use of a formal language permits us to verify that the specifications possess certain correctness properties, namely that the responsibilities assigned to roles are fulfilled, and that constraints are maintained as a result of process execution. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.