A method for business process decomposition based on the separation of concerns principle

  • Authors:

  • Artur Caetano;António Rito Silva;José Tribolet

  • Affiliations:

  • Technical University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal and Center for Organizational Design and Engineering, Lisboa, Portugal;Technical University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal and Center for Organizational Design and Engineering, Lisboa, Portugal;Technical University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal and Center for Organizational Design and Engineering, Lisboa, Portugal

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Functional decomposition breaks down a business process into a set of progressively more detailed activities. It facilitates the modular design of a system, the reuse of its parts and also contributes to increasing its comprehensibility. But achieving these qualities requires a business process to be decomposed consistently. Separation of concerns is the principle of separating a system into distinct features with a minimum of overlapping. This paper proposes using this principle to consistently decompose a business process into its constituent activities. An activity is modelled as a collaboration between role types that are played by entities. The decomposition method successively separates the overlapping roles until an activity is specified by the collaboration of an orthogonal set of role types. This method facilitates the consistent decomposition of a business process and the unambiguous identification of its atomic activities.