Modeling and In-Database Management of Relational, Data-Aware Processes

Abstract

During the last two decades, it has been increasingly acknowledged that the engineering of information systems usually requires a huge effort in integrating master data and business processes. This has led to a plethora of proposals, both from academia and the industry. However, such approaches typically come with ad-hoc abstractions to represent and interact with the data component. This has a twofold disadvantage. On the one hand, they cannot be used to effortlessly enrich an existing relational database with dynamics. On the other hand, they generally do not allow for integrated modelling, verification, and enactment. We attack these two challenges by proposing a declarative approach, fully grounded in SQL, that supports the agile modelling of relational data-aware processes directly on top of relational databases. We show how this approach can be automatically translated into a concrete procedural SQL dialect, executable directly inside any relational database engine. The translation exploits an in-database representation of process states that, in turn, is used to handle, at once, process enactment with or without logging of the executed instances, as well as process verification. The approach has been implemented in a working prototype.

Delta-BPMN: A Concrete Language and Verifier for Data-Aware BPMN

“…A second important point is that the vast majority of the contributions in this line of research provide foundational results, but do not come with corresponding operational tools for verification. Hence, all in all, we consider in this research only those approaches for the integration of data and processes that come with verification tool support: VERIFAS [16], BAUML [11], ISML [18], dapSL [4], and the delta-BPMN approach considered here, which relies on the DAB formal model [1] as its foundational basis.…”

“…Second, we show how the delta-BPMN front-end can be realized in actual business process management systems, considering in particular Camunda 3 , one of the most popular BPMN environments. Third, we report on the implementation of a translator that, building on the encoding rules abstractly defined in [1], takes a delta-BPMN model created in Camunda and transforms it into the syntax of MCMT 4 , a state-of-the-art SMT-based model checker for infinite-state systems that can then be used for verification.…”

Specifying and Executing User Agents in an Environment of Reasoning and RESTful Systems Using the Guard-Stage-Milestone Approach

“…Execution of workflows is typically driven by either flow or data. Flow-driven approaches include the popular BPMN language 7 . If we want to make use of data during workflow execution, we can either extend a flow-driven approach to make it data-aware, or we use an approach where data are a first-class citizen.…”

“…the following three approaches do not talk about the semantics of such languages. For instance, the Daphne approach [7] provides actions as abstraction on a SQL query or an external service call, both of which change the contents of a relational data base. With its roots in the formal investigations of data-centric dynamic systems [2], Daphne is closely related to [3], where a similar approach is investigated that works on a Description Logic knowledge base instead of a data base, and also provides actions 7 http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/.…”

MERLIN: An Intelligent Tool for Creating Domain Models

“…However, to achieve true consistency, the integration of different views is needed. Recently, the integration between the data and business process perspective is also gaining ground as exemplified by artefact centric approaches [15,16,17].…”