Declarative Process Modeling with Business Vocabulary and Business Rules
A process modeling language is declarative when it explicitly takes into account the business concerns that govern business processes. In this paper, we show how business concerns can be modeled declaratively using a fact-oriented business vocabulary that
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Abstract. A process modeling language is declarative when it explicitly takes into account the business concerns that govern business processes. In this paper, we show how business concerns can be modeled declaratively using a fact-oriented business vocabulary that allows to express sixteen different business rule types. In particular, we present the EMBrA2 CE Framework, an extension of the SBVR that allows for declarative process modeling. Keywords: fact-oriented modeling, workflow modeling, SBVR.
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Introduction
In general, one can think of the following business concerns to play a governing role in the organization of work: – – – – – –
Business regulations: external directives: laws and contracts. Business policies: internal directives; strategies and procedures. Costs and benefits: the incurred benefits and costs of an activity. Time: the overall time to process an activity. Information prerequisites: the information required to start an activity. Technical and common-sense constraints
Organizations often only implicitly think about these business concerns when they design business processes but pay little attention to documenting why specific design choices have been made. Instead of making these business concerns explicit, they are implicitly used to determine task control flows, information flows and work allocation schemes. In other words these aspects remain implicit but their effects are hard-coded directly in procedural process models. In this paper, we show how the business concerns that govern business processes can be modeled declaratively using a fact-oriented business vocabulary that allows to express business rules. The paper is structured as follows. In section 2 we contrast declarative and procedural process modeling. In section 3 we give a vocabulary for declarative process modeling, called the EM-BrA2 CE Vocabulary. This vocabulary is an extension of the SBVR and allows to declaratively refer to the state of a business process. In section 4 we identify a number R. Meersman, Z. Tari, P. Herrero et al. (Eds.): OTM 2007 Ws, Part I, LNCS 4805, pp. 603–612, 2007. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
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of business rule types that use this vocabulary to describe the state transition constraints of declarative process models. Finally, in section 5 we relate the EMBA2 CE Framework to the relevant literature.
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Procedural versus Declarative Process Modeling
A business process model is called procedural when it contains explicit information about how processes should proceed, but only implicitly keeps track of why these design choices have been made. Procedural process models are modeled with procedural languages such as the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) [1], the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) [2] and UML Activity Diagrams [3]. The counterpart of a procedural process model is a declarative one. Process modeling is said to have a declarative nature, when it explicitly takes into account the business concerns that govern business processes
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