Abstract
Supporting the everyday operation of business processes with the help of workflow management systems is a necessary prerequisite for many companies in order to stay competitive. Managing business processes comprises their modeling, analysis and execution support. Although investigated since the beginning of the nineties there is still a gap between the possibilities of the provided modeling languages, the expertise of the modeler and the requirements posed through the different steps within the management of business processes.
In this paper we propose an iterative procedure model for the management of business processes which starts on an informal and more abstract level and leads the modeler to a formal description containing details of the implementation. We start the procedure using event driven process chains an informal but in practice widely accepted modeling language. Throughout the procedure the description is transformed in a formal specification based on Petri nets. The Petri net model is than used for analysis purposes and finally refined to serve as base for the coordination of the process at run time. The innovation of the proposed procedure is based on a pragmatic correctness interpretation of business process descriptions.
This work is part of the joint research project ”DFG-Forschergruppe Petri Net Technology” between H. Weber (Coordinator), H.Ehrig and W. Reisig supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Verification of Workflow Nets. In: Azema, P., Balbo, G. (eds.) ICATPN 1997. LNCS, vol. 1248, pp. 407–426. Springer, Berlin (1997)
van der Aalst, W.M.P.: The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management. The Journal of Circuits, Systems and Computers 8(1), 21–66 (1998)
van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Formalization and Verification of Event-driven Process Chains. Information and Software Technology 41(10), 639–650 (1999)
van der Aalst, W.M.P., Kiepuszewski, B., ter Hofstede, A., Barros, A., Kiepuszewsk, B.: Advanced Workflow Patterns. In: Scheuermann, P., Etzion, O. (eds.) CoopIS 2000. LNCS, vol. 1901, pp. 18–29. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Adam, N.R., Atluri, V., Huang, W.-K.: Modeling and Analysis of Workflows Using Petri Net. Journal of Intelligent Information System, Special Issue on Workflow and Process Management 10(2), 131–158 (1998)
Dehnert, J., Gajewsky, M., Lembke, S., Weber, H.: The petri net baukasten: 2nd installment. In: Uniform Approaches to Graphical Process Specification Techniques(UniGra). Satellite workshop to European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS), Genova, Italy, Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Dehnert, J., Rittgen, P.: Relaxed Soundness of Business Processes. In: Dittrich, K.R., Geppert, A., Norrie, M.C. (eds.) CAiSE 2001. LNCS, vol. 2068, pp. 157–170. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Derks, W., Dehnert, J., Grefen, P., Jonker, W.: Customized atomicity specification for transactional workflow. In: Lu, H., Spaccapietra, S. (eds.) Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Cooperative Database Systems and Applications (CODAS 2001), pp. 155–164. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2001)
Keller, G., Nüttgens, M. Scheer, A.W.: Semantische Processmodellierung auf der Grundlage Ereignisgesteuerter Prozessketten (EPK). Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Wirtschaftsinformatik, Heft 89 (in German), University of Saarland, Saarbrücken (1992)
Langner, P., Schneider, C., Wehler, J.: Petri net based certification of event driven process chains. In: Desel, J., Silva, M. (eds.) ICATPN 1998. LNCS, vol. 1420, pp. 286–305. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)
Moldt, D., Rodenhagen, J.: Ereignisgesteuerte Prozessketten und Petrinetze zur Modellierung von Workflows. In: Giese, H., Philippi, S. (eds.) Visuelle Verhaltensmodellierung verteilter und nebenläufiger Software-Systeme, Workshop des Arbeitskreises GROOM der GI Fachgruppe 2.1.9 Objektorientierte SWEntwicklung (in German), vol. 24/00-I of Fachbericht, pp. 57–63 (2000)
Murata, T.: Petri nets: Properties, analysis, and applications. Proc. of the IEEE 77(4), 541–580 (1989)
De Nicola, R., Vaandrager, F.: Action versus state based logics for transition systems. In: Guessarian, I. (ed.) LITP 1990. LNCS, vol. 469, pp. 407–419. Springer, Heidelberg (1990)
Roch, S.: extended Computation Tree Logic. In: Burkhard, H.D., Czaja, L., Skowron, A., Starke, P. (eds.) Workshop Concurrency, Specification & Programming. Informatik-Bericht, vol. 140, pp. 225–234. Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin (2000)
Rump, F.J.: Geschäftsprozessmanagement auf der Basis ereignisgesteuerter Prozessketten. Formalisierung, Analyse und Ausführung von EPKs (in German). Teubner, Stuttgart (1999)
Scheer, A.W.: Business Process Engineering, ARIS-Navigator for Reference Models for Industrial Enterprises. Springer, Heidelberg (1994)
Schmidt, K.: Lola: A low level analyser. In: Nielsen, M., Simpson, D. (eds.) ICATPN 2000. LNCS, vol. 1825, pp. 465–474. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Sheth, A.P., Rusinkiewicz, M.: On transactional workflows. Data Engineering Bulletin 16(2), 34–40 (1993)
Verbeek, H.M.W., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Woflan 2.0: A petri-net-based workflow diagnosis tool. In: Nielsen, M., Simpson, D. (eds.) ICATPN 2000. LNCS, vol. 1825, pp. 475–484. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dehnert, J. (2003). Four Steps Towards Sound Business Process Models. In: Ehrig, H., Reisig, W., Rozenberg, G., Weber, H. (eds) Petri Net Technology for Communication-Based Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2472. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-40022-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-40022-6_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20538-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-40022-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive