Process Specialization: Defining Specialization for State Diagrams

A precise definition of specialization and inheritance promises to be as useful in organizational process modeling as it is in object modeling. It would help us better understand, maintain, reuse, and generate process models. However, even though object-oriented analysis and design methodologies take full advantage of the object specialization hierarchy, the process specialization hierarchy is not supported in major process representations, such as the state diagram, data flow diagram, and UML representations. Partly underlying this lack of support is an implicit assumption that we can always specialize a process by treating it as “just another object.” We argue in this paper that this is not so straightforward as it might seem; we argue that a process-specific approach must be developed. We propose such an approach in the form of a set of transformations which, when applied to a process description, always result in specialization. We illustrate this approach by applying it to the state diagram representation and demonstrate that this approach to process specialization is not only theoretically possible, but shows promise as a method for categorizing and analyzing processes. We point out apparent inconsistencies between our notion of process specialization and existing work on object specialization but show that these inconsistencies are superficial and that the definition we provide is compatible with the traditional notion of specialization.