Compliant and flexible business processes with business rules.

Abstract

When modeling business processes, we often implicitly think of internal business policies and external regulations. Yet to date, little attention is paid to avoid hard-coding policies and regulations directly in control-flow based process models. The standpoint of this analysis is the role of business rule modeling in achieving business process flexibility. In particular, it is argued that flexible business process models require business rules as a declarative formalism to capture the semantics of policy and regulation. Four kinds of business rules can be used as a starting point to generate less complex control-flow-based business process models. It is shown that these different kinds of business rules relate to different perspectives in the taxonomy of business process flexibility.