Analysis and Transformation of Behavioral Models Containing Overlapped Patterns.

Abstract

Most graphical process models (business processes, workflows) in practice can be split into single-entry-single-exit regions either with only or-logic or with only and-logic. There is however a pattern, called the overlapped pattern, that contains or-logic mixed with and-logic in such a way, that separation is not possible. We present a method to handle arbitrary overlapped patterns and thus solve a remaining open issue with respect to the analysis of unstructured behavioral models in graphical form and their transformation to structured programs in textual form.

Transformation from business process models to BPEL with overlapped patterns involved

“…Afterward, several methods begun to mention OP during translation (Hauser et al, 2008;van der Aalst and Lassen, 2008;Ouyang et al, 2009;Hauser, 2010aHauser, , 2010b. Ouyang et al (2006) illustrated the control link-based translation with an example containing an OP.…”

“…van der Aalst and Lassen (2008) provided a mapping from WF-nets to BPEL and implemented a tool called WorkflowNetBPEL4WS. Hauser et al discussed OP in detail in a series of work (Hauser et al, 2008;Hauser, 2010aHauser, , 2010b. In their research, a workflow model was decomposed into a region tree, which could be translated gradually using a set of region-reduction rules.…”

“…Those proposals mainly handled OPs in the following two ways: duplication of related nodes or utilisation of BPEL control links. The first one translated OP to structured forms by first duplicating the activities between the merge nodes and the join nodes, and then switching those two kinds of nodes (Hauser et al, 2008;Hauser, 2010aHauser, , 2010b. The other way treated OP as segments of a flow activity of BPEL (van der Aalst and Lassen, 2008;Ouyang et al, 2009).…”