Multilevel Business Process Modeling: Motivation, Approach, Design Issues, and Applications

Conceptual models organize real-world information from a business domain using a human-readable, yet formal repre­sentation language. Besides the static data model, many modeling approaches also consider the processes working with these data. In conceptual modeling, abstraction is a common design pattern to more accurately represent a busi­ness domain. For static data models, various modeling ap­proacheshavebeen proposedto represent complexmultilevel abstraction hierarchies. For process models, though, current modeling approaches do not provide a flexible and powerful formalism for representing complex multilevel abstraction hierarchies. In this paper, we motivate the need for mul­tilevel business process models and their applications. We present an initial approach towards multilevel business pro­cess modeling and sketch future research in this area which can mature into a dissertation.