Decision Model and Notation

In business analysis, the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) is a standard published by the Object Management Group.

DMN is a separate domain within the OMG that provides an explicit way to connect to processes in BPMN.

The example here describes a BPMN process and DMN DRD (Decision Requirements Diagram) for onboarding a bank customer.

In the BPMN process model shown in the figure, a customer makes a request to open a new bank account.

An account is certified for opening if the individual's' address is verified, and if valid identification is provided, and if the applicant is not on a list of criminals or politically exposed persons.

For identification to be valid, the customer must provide a driver's license, passport or government issued ID.

These rules are reflected in the figure below, which presents the decision table for whether to pass the provided name for the lists checks.

The expressive modeling capabilities of BPMN allows business analyst to understand the functions of the activities of the process.

Now with the addition of DMN, business analysts can construct an understandable model of complex decisions.

Automated discovery techniques that infer decision models from process execution data have been proposed as well.

[12] It extends DMN with constraint reasoning and related concepts while aiming to retain the user-friendliness of the original.

[13] It extends DMN in four ways: Due to these additions, cDMN models can express more complex problems.

[12] Unlike DMN, cDMN is not deterministic, in the sense that a set of input values could have multiple different solutions.

The constraint table shown in the figure (as denoted by its E* hit policy in the top-left corner) expresses this logic.