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International Conference on Business Process Management

BPM 2017: Business Process Management Forum pp 106–124Cite as

Soundness of Decision-Aware Business Processes

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 297))

Abstract

With the recent release of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) specification, standardized decision models can be designed to represent the decisions required for executing business processes. Outsourcing decision logic from process to decision models leads to a separation of concerns and therefore to decision-aware business processes. However, no exhaustive considerations regarding the soundness of the integration of the two types of models have been made so far. Classical soundness checking only looks at the control-flow of a process model. In this paper, we formally define soundness criteria for decision-aware processes that ensure that the process can continue after a decision has been taken, and that all activities following the decision can be executed. A scalable implementation and an analysis of models from participants of an online course on process and decision modeling as well as a from a BPM project of a large insurance company demonstrate the benefits of our contribution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.bahn.de/p_en/view/index.shtml.

  2. 2.

    We omit the collect policy because it is ambiguous with respect to this classification.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/camunda/camunda-modeler.

  4. 4.

    https://open.hpi.de/courses/bpm2016.

  5. 5.

    https://www.pega.com/de/bpm.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Kimon Batoulis & Mathias Weske

Authors
  1. Kimon Batoulis
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  2. Mathias Weske
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kimon Batoulis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Josep Carmona

  2. Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany

    Gregor Engels

  3. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

    Akhil Kumar

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Batoulis, K., Weske, M. (2017). Soundness of Decision-Aware Business Processes. In: Carmona, J., Engels, G., Kumar, A. (eds) Business Process Management Forum. BPM 2017. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 297. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65015-9_7

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