Modeling, Formalizing, and Animating Environment-Aware BPMN Collaborations

Business processes, in particular collaborations, describe how various participants interact and behave to achieve specific objectives. Depending on the business scenario, process participants operate in a specific environment characterized by spatial and contextual dimensions. Participants can interact with and modify the environment, which in turn may influence process execution. Indeed, there exists a bidirectional relationship between business processes and the environment, which involves the necessity of representing the environment in a way that allows business processes to benefit from its awareness. Despite extensive research on environment modeling, the seamless integration of business processes and environment models has not been explored yet. To address this gap, we conceptualize environment-aware BPMN collaboration models to capture spatial and contextual dimensions at the desired level of granularity and abstraction; we formalize the operational semantics of such models; and we propose a tool for animating their execution with the aid of geographic maps. We illustrate our findings through an emergency response collaborative scenario.