3D representation of business process models

Abstract

3D technologies open up new possibilities for modeling business processes. They provide higher plasticity and eliminate some deficits of conventional 2D process modeling such as the limitation of the amount of information to be integrated into a process model in an understandable way. The aim of this paper is to show how the usage of an additional visual modeling dimension may support users in compactly representing and animating business process models. For this purpose, we propose an approach for 3D representation of business process models based on Petri nets. The need for the third modeling dimension is pointed out with three modeling scenarios for which we propose modeling improvements in 3D space. Early evaluations indicate the effectiveness of our approach, which goes beyond conventional modeling tools for business processes.