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Over the past few years, a number of viewpoints have influenced the design of notations for business processes. They emphasize the different elements (tasks, business entities, and roles) that compose business process models; for this reason, they are referred to as activity-centric, data-centric, and role-centric viewpoints. The activity-centric viewpoint focuses on the orchestration of operational activities, which encompass human tasks and automatic ones. On the contrary, the data-centric viewpoint stresses the identification of the key business entities and their lifecycles consisting of states and transitions. In the role-centric viewpoint, a process model is made up of several “role” models; each role model provides a restricted view of the process limited to the behavior of the role under consideration. This chapter illustrates how the above-mentioned viewpoints can be extracted from a global model, with the help of an example concerning the submission of papers to conferences.

In contrast with the traditional view that represents business processes as flow charts of tasks, the artifact-centric one stresses the importance of the data flow, as the main responsible for the activation of the tasks. This viewpoint leads to reconsider the interactions between the process and its tasks as well as the execution mode of the tasks. The greatest benefits concern human tasks; they should no longer be considered only as services implemented by people but they may enable their performers to make choices. Two kinds of human choices are considered in this paper: the choice of the inputs to be acted on, and the choice of the course of action to be taken. The execution mode of human tasks is also examined and three categories are illustrated: performer-driven tasks, process-driven tasks and macro tasks. These categories come with a number of patterns, which are exemplified in this paper.

Current notations for business processes are mainly technological tools and lack strong links with the ontological items, i.e., the tasks and the business entities that information systems consist of. In particular, the information flow is missing from process models and human decisions are not adequately represented. In order to overcome those drawbacks, this paper proposes a notation, called TOMP (Task-Oriented Modeling of business Processes), which considers tasks and decisions as first-class constructs in process models and provides the explicit representation of the information flow in connection with an information model. It also illustrates the structure of to-do lists, which are the major interface between the participants and their tasks.

Since business processes may address complex behavioral requirements resulting from the integration of several items, i.e. tasks, business entities (also called artifacts), control flow rules and data flow rules, they need notations able to accommodate several viewpoints. This chapter proposes a notation, ARTS, aimed at integrating the traditional activity-oriented viewpoint and the artifact-oriented one. The major benefits are the unification of the control flow and the data flow and a clear representation of the choices to be carried out by the participants. The basic features are illustrated with the help of three versions of a simplified hiring process. This chapter also deals with the structure of work lists, which are the major interface between the participants and their tasks. The organization of the work lists leverages the artifacts to emphasize human choices; for this reason, the traditional linear structure is replaced with a network one, which shows the artifacts along with their states, correlations and valid options.