Declarative workflows: Balancing between flexibility and support

Abstract

Today's process-aware information systems tend to either support business processes or provide flexibility. Classical workflow management systems offer good process support as long as the processes are structured and do not require much flexibility. Information systems that allow for flexibility have a tendency to lack process-related support. If systems offer guidance, then they are typically also inclined to "enforce guidelines" and are perceived as inflexible. Moreover, implementing flexible systems is far from trivial. This paper will show that using a more declarative approach can assist in a better balance between flexibility and support. This is demonstrated by presenting the Declare framework that aims to take care of the full spectrum of flexibility while at the same time supports the user using recommendations and other process-mining-based diagnostics.

Agile Service Development: A Rule-Based Method Engineering Approach

“…Activities can be temporally ordered, but do not need to be in principle. This is in line with the principles of declarative workflow [13] and allows for minimal specification: formally planning only what needs to be planned, and leaving the rest to the team's powers of selforganization.…”

Distributed Process Discovery and Conformance Checking

“…For example, we formalize the notion of an event log and provide some Petri net basics. Moreover, we show an example of a declarative language (Declare [8]) grounded in LTL.…”

“…Therefore, we elaborate on Declare. Declare is both a language (in fact a family of languages) and a fully functional WFM system [8,24]. Declare uses a graphical notation and its semantics are based on LTL (Linear Temporal Logic) [8].…”

“…Whereas in a procedural model, everything is forbidden unless explicitly enabled, a declarative model allows for anything unless explicitly forbidden. For processes with a lot of flexibility, declarative models are more appropriate [8,24].…”

“…We use Petri nets as typical representatives of conventional procedural models. To illustrate the use of declarative models in the context of distributed process mining, we elaborate on the Declare language [8]. Section 4 discusses different ways of measuring conformance while zooming in on the notion of fitness.…”