Tools for Business Process Modelling:
Operational Modeller - the new version of PrimeObjects of Politecnico di Torino
Operational Modeler is a Windows-based environment for modeling, simulating, prototyping and publishing enterprise models. PrimeFlow is a web-based workflow engine enacting the business processes that have been modeled with the Operational Modeler. Both tools are developed by PrimeSoft, Torino, Italy.
Enterprise models result from the integration of three major aspects: processes, organisation and enterprise data. With Operational Modeler you can build enterprise models using building blocks taken from an extensible library. Building blocks are enriched with attributes and are related to each other with associations. The classes, the relationships between classes and the attributes of classes and relationships are defined in the underlying schema, which guarantees the syntactic correctness of the models. The organisation defines the people (logins) involved in the processes, the organisational structure and the roles required by the human-based activities. The BusinessObjects section enables you to define the classes of the enterprise objects to be acted on by the processes.
After the processes have been tested in the prototyping environment, they can be deployed and managed using PrimeFlow. Users participate in the workflow using Internet Explorer 5 and exchange data with PrimeFlow through ASP.
Operational Modeler exports enterprise models in xml and vml. The way in which they are shown is controlled by xsl scripts. Web-based enterprise documentation can thus be generated on demand in a flexible way and, what is more important, specific information is provided on the basis of the requestor.
The behaviour of the actors involved in a process, such as people and resources, can be represented in Operational Modeler by time-based behavioural processes thus yielding a time-driven model that can be run by a discrete-event simulator.
Contact : Professor Giorgio Bruno, bruno@polito.it
Dipartimento Automatica ed Informatica,
Politecnico di Torino, Italy