Classifying Business Processes for Domain Engineering

Enterprises build information systems to support their business processes. Some of those business processes are industry or enterprise-specific, but most are common to many industries and are used, modulo a few modifications, in different contexts. To the extent that we can: i) decompose complex business processes into composable generic sub-processes, ii) develop software components that implement such generic processes, and iii) map process specialization and composition operators to corresponding operators on software components, we are able to develop information systems by modeling the business processes that they are meant to support, and using such models to guide the assembly of the corresponding software components. This is not a new idea, but earlier attempts suffered from the lack of tools, conceptual and otherwise, to perform this mapping. In this paper, we describe the principles underlying our approach and the status of the current implementation in the Eclipse environment