Process management and orchestration

Abstract

Process automation is a concept used in logistics that has been adopted in some data centre management software suites recently as “Orchestration managers”. This project is about mapping out and comparing approaches to process management. Specifically, two popular and very different process modelling methods were compared. One is the BPMN (Business Process Management Notation) that uses the traditional method to model the process in a flow. The other is the Promise Theory that models the process in a network of interacting autonomous agents. Our research question is what’s the differences between two methods. We used Promise Theory in two ways: as a framework for discussing modeling of processes, and as a tool for modeling. Results show that Promise Theory can model more features of a process than BPMN. Promise Theory with fewer symbols is easier to learn but requires more thinking when using than BPMN. Under the circumstances where there are many asynchronous activities or many agents/roles involved in the process, Promise Theory has better performance to model the agents’ autonomous behavior and the interaction between them.