Applying the principle of separation of concerns to business process design

Functional decomposition breaks down a business process into a set of progressively more detailed activities. It facilitates the modular design of a system, the reuse of its parts and also contributes to increasing its comprehensibility. But achieving these qualities requires a business process to be decomposed consistently. Separation of concerns is the principle of separating a system into distinct features with a minimum of overlapping. This paper proposes using this principle to consistently decompose a business process into its constituent activities. An activity is modelled as a collaboration between role types that are played by entities. The decomposition method successively separates the overlapping roles until an activity is specified by the collaboration of an orthogonal set of role types. This method facilitates the consistent decomposition and design of a business process and the unambiguous identification of its atomic activities.