The idea of this thesis is to develop tool support for the Business Process Architecture Language (BPAL) we are currently developing. The development is a joint effort of UGentMIS (Prof. Geert Poels) and the ALARCOS research group of the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Prof. Francisco Ruiz, Prof. Felix Garcia, Prof. Mario Piattini).

A good starting point for the research is a recent paper co-authored by Geert Poels, as an output of a joint research project with the ALARCOS research group of the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Ciudad Real, Spain). You can download the paper here: https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8625249

BPAL is a modelling language that can be used to describe the ‘system’ of business processes in an organisation. Contrary to BPMN, it does not focus on a single process, but on the interplay of different work processes and on their role within the organisation’s enterprise architecture. After having developed a conceptualisation (i.e., ontology) and meta-model for business process architecture, the current research focuses on modelling and analysis techniques. Tool support is a necessary component of such techniques.

The thesis research involves

  1. Study of business process architecture, modelling tools, and the research on BPAL to determine the tool requirements;
  2. Design of alternative concrete syntaxes (i.e., notations) for BPAL;
  3. Experimentation to determine the best alternative;
  4. Implementation of the selected alternative in a tool (e.g., Archi tool);
  5. Demonstration on a case-study;
  6. Evaluation of the tool requirements.

The research might require some collaboration with researchers/students from ALARCOS, in particular with respect to activities 2 and 3.

A pilot study for the thesis is available and can be found here https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8627323