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This wiki provides an overview of the general characteristics of fragment-based Case Management (fCM) and lists concrete guidelines that support and simplify modeling with this approach. For a given business process, these characteristics allow designers to first check whether fCM is a suitable modeling language for the process. If this is the case, the guidelines provide assistance for modeling in the form of suggestions. Furthermore, they can be used as a basis for a modeling tool and can be checked automatically. The guidelines thus summarize what constitutes a correct fCM model.

You can find the guidelines and characteristics on the right, each being explained on a separate wiki page.

Guidelines' Structure

The guidelines were developed in order to support designers who are already familiar with the domain of business process modeling but lack knowledge/understanding of fCM. Users without any previous experience in modeling or business processes will only be able to use these guidelines to a limited extent. Based on the general structure of fCM, the guidelines are grouped by guidelines for Fragments, Object Lifecycles (OLC), Data Models, Goal State, and Consistency. These four categories represent the four artifacts of fCM while the fifth category represents suggestions for cross-artifact modeling, i.e., dependencies between, for example, OLC and the fragments. Furthermore, there are general guidelines for general modeling independent of the specific artifact. This grouping supports the designer in every way of modeling. It does not matter whether modeling is based on a process-first approach or other methodologies (cf. [Hewelt et al., 2018]). This preserves the flexibility of the user.

In general, a guideline consists of three required components (ID, Name and Description) and three optional components (Example, Motivation and References). This framework is based on the work of [Corradini et al.] who presented modeling guidelines for BPMN. The closeness of fCM to BPMN motivated to adopt some suggestions and extend the framework in other parts.

• ID: A combination of a letter (first letter of the artifact) and a number uniquely identifies a guideline. For example, "F1" for the first guideline for fragments. This is only for easier assignment.
• Name: A short, concise name for the guideline that briefly tells the designer what it contains.
• Description: This explanation describes the guideline and its content in more detail.
• Example: It is used to visualize the content of the guideline and to make it easier to understand the guideline. The examples are all based on the Use Case of criminal justice. However, as it is not always possible to provide a helpful example, this component is optional.
• Motivation: Some guidelines cannot be derived directly from fCM, because the modeling approach often allows several ways to model a situation. However, based on the context and content of the process, one option should be preferred. The rationale for this is provided in this component.
• References: A list of literature for further information. This includes sources that have led to the theoretical foundation and formulation of the guideline.

Related Work

Modeling business processes can be essentially simplified by so-called guidelines. Formulated as simple suggestions, they support the designer especially in terms of consistency and integrity of the process model [Avila et al. 2020] while focusing on high quality of the model [Moreno-Montes de Oca and Snoeck, 2014]. There are several approaches to defining guidelines. Independent of modeling languages, Mendling et al. [Mendling et al., 2010] provide seven general guidelines to improve "the quality of [process] models, in the sense that these are likely (1) to become comprehensible to various stakeholders and (2) to contain few syntactical errors." In contrast, [Moreno-Montes de Oca and Snoeck, 2014] first identify problems encountered in BPMN models, which then lead to guidelines and recommendations, and Avila et al. [Avila et al. 2020] provide a more comprehensive list of guidelines for BPMN modeling based on a systematic literature review. [Corradini et al.] introduce a very structured approach and define a guideline by an ID, a name, an example and references. Furthermore, the authors emphasize the necessity of guidelines with regard to an automated verification of models with the help of a tool.

With regard to fCM, such guidelines are missing. Although several works describe the way of modeling [Hewelt and Weske, 2016; Haarmann, 2020], a compact and practicable overview of guidelines is missing. Our work provides such an overview, which serves as foundation for the design support tool that we are developing.

References

[Avila et al. 2020] Avila, D. T., dos Santos, R. I., Mendling, J., & Thom, L. H. (2020). A systematic literature review of process modeling guidelines and their empirical support. Business Process Management Journal.
[Corradini et al., 2018] Corradini, F., Ferrari, A., Fornari, F., Gnesi, S., Polini, A., Re, B., & Spagnolo, G. O. (2018). A guidelines framework for understandable BPMN models. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 113, 129-154.
[Haarmann, 2020] Haarmann, S. (2020). Fragment-Based Case Management Models: Metamodel, Consistency, and Correctness. Central-European Workshop on Services and their Composition (ZEUS 2020), 1, 1.
[Hewelt et al., 2018] Hewelt, M., Wolff, F., Mandal, S., Pufahl, L., & Weske, M. (2018). Towards a methodology for case model elicitation. In Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling (pp. 181-195). Springer, Cham.
[Hewelt and Weske, 2016] Hewelt, M., & Weske, M. (2016, September). A hybrid approach for flexible case modeling and execution. In International Conference on Business Process Management (pp. 38-54). Springer, Cham.
[Mendling et al., 2010] Mendling, J., Reijers, H. A., & van der Aalst, W. M. (2010). Seven process modeling guidelines (7PMG). Information and Software Technology, 52(2), 127-136.
[Moreno-Montes de Oca and Snoeck, 2014] Moreno-Montes de Oca, I., & Snoeck, M. (2014). Pragmatic guidelines for business process modeling. Available at SSRN 2592983.