Modeling Business Processes

An introduction to the modeling of business information systems, with processes formally modeled using Petri nets.

This comprehensive introduction to modeling business-information systems focuses on business processes. It describes and demonstrates the formal modeling of processes in terms of Petri nets, using a well-established theory for capturing and analyzing models with concurrency. The precise semantics of this formal method offers a distinct advantage for modeling processes over the industrial modeling languages found in other books on the subject. Moreover, the simplicity and expressiveness of the Petri nets concept make it an ideal language for explaining foundational concepts and constructing exercises. After an overview of business information systems, the book introduces the modeling of processes in terms of classical Petri nets. This is then extended with data, time, and hierarchy to model all aspects of a process. Finally, the book explores analysis of Petri net models to detect design flaws and errors in the design process. The text, accessible to a broad audience of professionals and students, keeps technicalities to a minimum and offers numerous examples to illustrate the concepts covered. Exercises at different levels of difficulty make the book ideal for independent study or classroom use.

Wil M.P. van der Aalst is Distinguished University Professor at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. He is the coauthor of Workflow Management: Models, Methods, and Systems and Modeling Business Processes: A Petri Net-Oriented Approach (both published by the MIT Press).

Christian Stahl is a postdoctoral researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology.