Constraint-based analysis of business process models

Doctoral Thesis

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) has become the standard for business processes diagrams. In order to provide tools support to analyze the behavior of a BPMN model, we present a mapping of BPMN models to Reo networks. The Reo coordination language is an exogenous coordination language that realizes the coordination patterns. We present a constraint-based framework, which unifies various formal semantics of Reo. In this framework, the behavior of a Reo network is described using constraints. The constraint-based nature of our approach allows the simultaneous coexistence of several semantics in a simple fashion. The behavior of a Reo network is determined by the solutions to these constraints. Since any solution should satisfy all the encoded formal semantics, the framework eliminated any inconsistent behavior between the Reo formal semantics. Another advantage of our proposed constraint-based approach is its efficiency due to optimization techniques that are used in the...Show more Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) has become the standard for business processes diagrams. In order to provide tools support to analyze the behavior of a BPMN model, we present a mapping of BPMN models to Reo networks. The Reo coordination language is an exogenous coordination language that realizes the coordination patterns. We present a constraint-based framework, which unifies various formal semantics of Reo. In this framework, the behavior of a Reo network is described using constraints. The constraint-based nature of our approach allows the simultaneous coexistence of several semantics in a simple fashion. The behavior of a Reo network is determined by the solutions to these constraints. Since any solution should satisfy all the encoded formal semantics, the framework eliminated any inconsistent behavior between the Reo formal semantics. Another advantage of our proposed constraint-based approach is its efficiency due to optimization techniques that are used in the off-the-shelf constraint solvers. We support this claim with a case study. In this dissertation, we present an alternative approach to model priority in Reo by extending our constraint-based framework with priority-aware premises. Further, we extend our priority-aware formal model to support not only a binary notion of priority, but also numeric priorities. Show less

Coordination languages

Priority

Constraint satisfaction

Reo

BPMN