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On the Trade-Off Between Flexibility and Extensionality in the Decomposition of Business Process Models

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Book cover Novel Methods and Technologies for Enterprise Information Systems

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation ((LNISO,volume 8))

Abstract

The decomposition of business processes and related artifacts is a necessary concept in conceptual modeling as well as in the definition of executable workflows. Decomposition is supported by almost all business process modeling notations and execution engines. Thereby the design of the interfaces and the semantics of these are an important factor to concern with impact, e.g., on a common understanding of the involved stakeholders. In this paper we analyze the flexibility and expressiveness of business process specifications with respect to hierarchical structure in a modeling language independent manner. The semantics of how instances of process capsules are initially and intermediately triggered via their interfaces turns out to be crucial for the discussion. We aim at clarifying the situation by characterizing and comparing a kind of intensional, so-called open, and a kind of extensional, so-called closed semantics for business process capsules.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Mannheim, 68131, Mannheim, Germany

    Dirk Draheim

Authors
  1. Dirk Draheim
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Correspondence to Dirk Draheim .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Felix Piazolo

  2. University of innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Michael Felderer

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Draheim, D. (2014). On the Trade-Off Between Flexibility and Extensionality in the Decomposition of Business Process Models. In: Piazolo, F., Felderer, M. (eds) Novel Methods and Technologies for Enterprise Information Systems. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07055-1_7

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