From Goal-Achievement to the Maintenance of Relationships: Extending Business Process Models with Homeostasis and Appreciation

We use homeostasis, the maintenance of steady states in an organism, to explain some of the decisions made by participants in a business process. We use Vickers’s Appreciative System to model the homeostatic states with Harel’s statecharts. We take the example of a PhD recruitment process formally defined between a faculty member, a graduate student candidate and a doctoral school. Our analysis uncovers some hidden process scenarios. As a result, these scenarios can be integrated into the process model and eventually taken into account by the process supporting software.