Using Business Process Management to Enhance Synthetic Biology Workflows

Synthetic biology is based on engineering principles, and a key principle for the characterisation of parts is the consistency and replicability of workflow processes. This requires a method of specifying processes, modelling data structures, defining user interfaces and the integration with existing standards and with technologies, both computational and robotic. The method needs to allow the collection and analysis of as much data as possible.

Business Process Management (BPM) encompasses a field of techniques used to optimise workflows. In this study, BPM methods are used to model synthetic biology processes to standardise experiments, increase the ease of automation and allow analysis of workflow data. This study demonstrates an implementation of BPM for synthetic biology using the Bizagi BPM Suite, with the data structure stored in a SQL Server Database, and custom ASP.NET websites used for additional data handling and analysing.

As part of this integration, the workflow processes were first modelled using industry-standard Business Process Model Notation (BPMN), a widely accepted format for specifying processes in graphical form. The processes were then automated and combined to produce an application that could be accessed by an end user via a web-browser. Tasks in the process can be undertaken by an experimentalist or integrate directly with other technologies.

The benefits of using BPM include:

• Ease of constructing and altering processes with minimal programming.
• Defining simple user interfaces.
• Visibility of all sub-processes and individual tasks that form a process.
• Reproducibility of processes due to design of processes in standard BPM notation.
• Standardised representation of protocols.