Cognitive Efforts in Using Integrated Models of Business Processes and Rules

The conceptual and pragmatic overlap between business process models and business rules indicates a need to model the two related aspects together. Yet, in practice, many business rules are modeled separately from the processes models they affect. While a considerable amount of research has developed integration methods for process and business rule modeling, whether such integration improves (or diminishes) the understanding of business processes has not been investigated. This paper explores whether the integration of business process models with business rules improves user cognition of process models. A four-stage cognitive process is proposed in the context of process model understanding followed by a discussion of how each of the process stages is affected by integrated models based on underlying theoretical perspectives from cognitive science.