Gamification of Declarative Process Models for Learning and Model Verification
Recently, a surge in the use of declarative process models has been witnessed. These constraint-driven models excel at representing and enacting flexible and adaptable decision processes in application areas such as scheduling and workflow management. Thi
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Abstract. Recently, a surge in the use of declarative process models has been witnessed. These constraint-driven models excel at representing and enacting flexible and adaptable decision processes in application areas such as scheduling and workflow management. This work examines the intricacies of the most widespread declarative process language, Declare, which are commonly referred to as hidden dependencies. These dependencies typically increase the steepness of the learning curve of Declare models and making them explicit can lower the threshold for modelers to use Declare in a sense-making and intuitive way. This work proposes a way to gamify Declare models for novice users by annotating such models with extra constraint and dependency information, and feedback. Hence, it offers the ability of discovering Declare and its intricacies in a game-like fashion which lowers the threshold for learning these cognitively demanding models, as well as to use them for assessing modeling efforts by verifying that the desired behavior is present.
Keywords: Declarative process modeling Hidden dependencies
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Introduction
Business process modeling has traditionally focused on explicitly representing the workflow of companies’ decision-making, capturing fixed process paths which leave little room for flexibility and ad-hoc process adaptation. This setup has been labeled the procedural process paradigm, reflecting its prescriptive nature. Lately, a shift towards activity- and rule-centric approaches can be witnessed in literature. Modeling languages, such as Declare [1], use constraints in-between activities which allows everything that is not forbidden. Hence, these models leave more options for deviation and adaptation, enabling more flexible enactment. A full comparison of languages and techniques can be found in [2]. Users of declarative process models, especially novice modelers and readers, face the struggle of understanding all the implications of such models. As there is no fixed process sequence, and since the interdependencies of different constraints c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 M. Reichert and H.A. Reijers (Eds.): BPM Workshops 2015, LNBIP 256, pp. 432–443, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-42887-1 35
Gamification of Declarative Process Models
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contain implicit behavior that is not immediately visible [3], it becomes hard to start using them without a thorough education. This work tackles this issue by offering a proof-of-concept approach for expliciting hidden dependencies, and offer them to the user in game-like fashion, i.e., by coloring Declare models with this information in a simulation environment, that also supports a guessing functionality. This approach goes beyond the coloring of separate constraints [4], as it constitutes sets of interrelated constraints. The paper is structured as follows. In the next section, an overview of the state-of-art including flexible process modeling approaches and Declare is given, followed by a small motivating example in Sect. 3.
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