A rewriting logic approach to resource allocation analysis in business process models

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for the modeling and analysis of resource allocation for business processes. It enables the automatic computation of measures for precisely identifying and optimizing the allocation of resources in business processes, including resource usage over time. The proposed analysis, especially suited to support decision-making strategies, is illustrated with a case study of a parcel ordering and delivery by drones that is developed throughout the paper. The paper comprises an encoding of a significant and expressive subset of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) in rewriting logic, an executable logic of concurrent change that can naturally deal with state and with concurrent computations. The encoding is by itself a formal semantics and interpreter of the BPMN subset that captures all concurrent behavior and thus is used to simulate the concurrent evolution of any business process with a given number of resources and replicas.

Resource provisioning strategies for BPMN processes: Specification and analysis using Maude

“…The formalization of real-time probabilistic BPMN builds on recent results [7]. Its Maude specification consists of two parts: the process structure, as an equational specification -a membership equational logic theory Spec BPMN so that a process model P is an element of the (ground) term algebra T Spec BPMN -and its evolution semantics using rewrite rules -the rewrite theory RT BPMN extends Spec BPMN and defines the behavior of BPMN processes by providing some additional definitions and rules specifying such a behavior.…”

“…For inclusive gateways, the semantics of BPMN 1.0 and 2.0 are both supported in this specification. A detailed description of the different rules handling the different types of gateways can be found in [7].…”

“…Please, see the discussion in Section 7 for details on the contributions of this paper with respect to that work. The current Maude specification builds on the one developed by the same authors in previous related work [6,7] for different forms of analysis of business processes. These other works are also discussed in Section 7.…”

Analysis of the Runtime Resource Provisioning of BPMN Processes Using Maude

“…Sperl et al [20] describe a stochastic method for quantifying resource utilization relative to structural properties of processes and historical executions. In [9], Maude is used to model and analyze the resource allocation of business processes. In this work, optimal allocation is presented as a multi-objective optimization problem, where response time and resource usage are minimized.…”

“…builds on the one developed by the same authors in previous related work [8,9] for different forms of analysis of business processes. The reader is referred to http://maude.lcc.uma.…”