Animating Multiple Instances in BPMN Collaborations: From Formal Semantics to Tool Support

The increasing adoption of modelling methods contributes to a better understanding of the flow of processes, from the internal behaviour of a single organisation to a wider perspective where several organisations exchange messages. In this regard, BPMN collaboration is a suitable modelling abstraction. Even if this is a widely accepted notation, only a limited effort has been expended in formalising its semantics, especially for what it concerns the interplay among control features, data handling and exchange of messages in scenarios requiring multiple instances of interacting participants. In this paper, we face the problem of providing a formal semantics for BPMN collaborations including multiple instances, while taking into account the data perspective. Beyond defining a novel formalisation, we also provide a BPMN collaboration animator tool faithfully implementing the formal semantics. Its visualisation facilities support designers in debugging multi-instance collaboration models.