Antara Nandy
High-Level Design and Analysis of Business Processes
The Advantages of Declarative Specifications
I. Rychkova, G. Regev, A. Wegmann
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland design [4]. Modeling techniques, such as BPMN [5] and use cases [6], also encourage modeling details at an early stage. As a result, in many cases, an organization will commit to one of the execution paths (e.g. paying before sending the goods) and later, handle the second one (sending the goods before receiving the payment) as an exception. The number of exceptions, however, often results in tangled processes containing many exceptions. This has two related consequences. First of all, the alignment between the strategy of the organization (i.e. selling on-line) and its detailed business processes is not apparent. Second, the flexibility of the processes themselves [7] is limited because they become difficult to manage and change. In this paper, we propose a technique that complements imperative business process specifications with declarative specifications. This declarative specification enables designers to describe the actions that a business process needs to contain, but not their sequence. It omits the specification of the control flow between the actions thus keeping the process design independent from constraints imposed by an environment in which this process will be implemented. The control flow, often specific to a given environment, is later modeled in an imperative specification. Our technique includes checking the conformance of the imperative and the declarative specifications. Presented technique can improve the alignment of the business process with the business strategy of an organization by giving a synthesis of a set of business processes (abstracting the control flow) while maintaining a rigorous relationship with the detailed process. Flexibility may also be enhanced because alternative paths are modeled as separate business processes
The Advantages of Declarative Specifications
I. Rychkova, G. Regev, A. Wegmann
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland design [4]. Modeling techniques, such as BPMN [5] and use cases [6], also encourage modeling details at an early stage. As a result, in many cases, an organization will commit to one of the execution paths (e.g. paying before sending the goods) and later, handle the second one (sending the goods before receiving the payment) as an exception. The number of exceptions, however, often results in tangled processes containing many exceptions. This has two related consequences. First of all, the alignment between the strategy of the organization (i.e. selling on-line) and its detailed business processes is not apparent. Second, the flexibility of the processes themselves [7] is limited because they become difficult to manage and change. In this paper, we propose a technique that complements imperative business process specifications with declarative specifications. This declarative specification enables designers to describe the actions that a business process needs to contain, but not their sequence. It omits the specification of the control flow between the actions thus keeping the process design independent from constraints imposed by an environment in which this process will be implemented. The control flow, often specific to a given environment, is later modeled in an imperative specification. Our technique includes checking the conformance of the imperative and the declarative specifications. Presented technique can improve the alignment of the business process with the business strategy of an organization by giving a synthesis of a set of business processes (abstracting the control flow) while maintaining a rigorous relationship with the detailed process. Flexibility may also be enhanced because alternative paths are modeled as separate business processes
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