A Rule-Based Language for Integrating Business Processes and Business Rules

International audienceBusiness process modeling has become a popular method for improving organizational efficiency and quality. Automatic validation of process models is one of the most valuable features of modeling tools, in face of the increasing complexity of enterprise business processes and the richness of modeling languages. This paper proposes a formal language, Event-Condition-Action-Event (ECAE), for integrating Colored Petri Nets (CPN)-based business process with a set of business rules. We automate the integration process for validating the business process model. The ECAE language has several important features: its reasoning capabilities, its ability to express complex actions and events, and its declarative semantics. By enabling simulation of business process behavior, the reasoning capabilities facilitate the early detection of flaws The widespread use of business process modeling has helped enterprises to design, control and analyze many operational processes. Unfortunately, syntactic and semantic inconsistencies often appear in business process models, especially as the complexity of the models increases. Flaw detection and automation are essential for ensuring cost-effective and correct process models. The challenge for system designers is to build a flexible intelligent system, which accepts and verifies the change on business process and business rules automatically. The business process must be integrated with a set of business rules, and a correspondence between the process and the rules must be created. This must be flexible since the business process and the business rules may be modified during runtime. The verification should be a rule-based system, which can reason and deduce new knowledge or a new decision based on a set of rules and facts. This paper proposes a formal language ECAE for business process modeling, which takes advantage of both the graphical representation of colored Petri nets and the easy to represent ECA rule. It designs a business process model through CPN and translate

ALIGNMENT OF BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT AND BUSINESS RULES

Business process management and business rules management both focus on controlling business activities in organizations. Although both management principles have the same focus, they approach manageability and controllability from different perspectives. As more organizations deploy business process management and business rules management, this paper argues that these often separated efforts should be integrated. The goal of this work is to present a step towards this integration. We propose a business rule categorization that is aligned to the business process management lifecycle. In a case study and through a survey the proposed rule categories are validated in terms of mutual exclusivity and completeness. The results indicate the completeness of our main categorization and the categories’ mutual exclusivity. Future research should indicate further refinement by identifying rule subcategories

Business Rules Management Solutions Problem Space: Situational Factors

Business rules management solutions are widely applied, standalone or in combination with business process management solutions. Yet scientific research on business rules management solutions is limited. The purpose of this paper is to define the business rules management solution problem space. Using contingency theory and relational theory as our lens, we conducted a qualitative study on 39 business rules management solutions. The range of data sources included interviews and document analysis. From the qualitative study six situational factors have been defined to classify the business rules management solution space: 1) value proposition, 2) approach, 3) standardization, 4) change frequency, 5) n-order compliance, and 6) integrative power of the software environment. The six factors can be clustered in three structures 1) deep structure, 2) physical structure and, 3) organizational structure. The classification of the problem space provides a framework for the analysis of business rules management solutions

A Ontology-based Approach for Business Process Compliance Checking

International audienceThe early detection of flaws and errors has become a significant feature of a business process modeling tool. This paper proposes an ontology-based approach for business process compliance checking. The business processes and the business rules are represented in a machine understandable form, a reasoner is used to reason on this knowledge base for detecting the potential semantic error by using a set of predefined rules