Abstract
The integrated management of business processes and master data is being increasingly considered as a fundamental problem, by both the academia and the industry. In this position paper, we focus on the foundations of the problem, arguing that contemporary approaches struggle to find a suitable equilibrium between data- and process-related aspects. We then propose a new formal model, called db-nets, that balances such two pillars through the marriage of colored Petri nets and relational databases. We invite the research community to build on this new model, discussing in particular its potential in conceptual modeling, formal verification, and simulation.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
If \(\theta (x)\) is defined, its value is replaced by \(\mathtt {o} \), otherwise \(\theta \) is extended so that \(\theta (x) =\mathtt {o} \).
- 3.
Hence, given a multiset S, we have \(0 \cdot S = \emptyset \).
References
Aalst, W.M.P.: Verification of workflow nets. In: Azéma, P., Balbo, G. (eds.) ICATPN 1997. LNCS, vol. 1248, pp. 407–426. Springer, Heidelberg (1997). doi:10.1007/3-540-63139-9_48
Aalst, W.M.P.: Process cubes: slicing, dicing, rolling up and drilling down event data for process mining. In: Song, M., Wynn, M.T., Liu, J. (eds.) AP-BPM 2013. LNBIP, vol. 159, pp. 1–22. Springer, Cham (2013). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-02922-1_1
van der Aalst, W.M.P., Stahl, C.: Modeling Business Processes - A Petri Net-Oriented Approach. Cooperative Information Systems series. MIT Press, Cambridge (2011)
van der Aalst, W.M.P., Weske, M., Grünbauer, D.: Case handling: a new paradigm for business process support. Data Knowl. Eng. 53(2), 129–162 (2005)
Abdulla, P.A., Aiswarya, C., Atig, M.F., Montali, M., Rezine, O.: Recency-bounded verification of dynamic database-driven systems. In: Proceedings of PODS. ACM Press (2016)
Abiteboul, S., Hull, R., Vianu, V.: Foundations of Databases. Addison Wesley, Redwood City (1995)
Abiteboul, S., Segoufin, L., Vianu, V.: Static analysis of active XML systems. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 34(4), 23 (2009)
Badouel, E., Hélouët, L., Morvan, C.: Petri nets with semi-structured data. In: Proceedings of PN, LNCS. Springer (2015)
Bagheri Hariri, B., Calvanese, D., De Giacomo, G., Deutsch, A., Montali, M.: Verification of relational data-centric dynamic systems with external services. In: Proceedings of PODS, pp. 163–174. ACM (2013)
Bagheri Hariri, B., Calvanese, D., Deutsch, A., Montali, M.: State boundedness in data-aware dynamic systems. In: Proceedings of KR (2014)
Calvanese, D., De Giacomo, G., Montali, M.: Foundations of data aware process analysis: a database theory perspective. In: Proceedings of PODS (2013)
Calvanese, D., Giacomo, G., Montali, M., Patrizi, F.: Verification and synthesis in description logic based dynamic systems. In: Faber, W., Lembo, D. (eds.) RR 2013. LNCS, vol. 7994, pp. 50–64. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-39666-3_5
Calvanese, D., Delzanno, G., Montali, M.: Verification of relational multiagent systems with data types. In: Proceedings of AAAI (2015)
Calvanese, D., Montali, M., Syamsiyah, A., Aalst, W.M.P.: Ontology-driven extraction of event logs from relational databases. In: Reichert, M., Reijers, H.A. (eds.) BPM 2015. LNBIP, vol. 256, pp. 140–153. Springer, Cham (2016). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-42887-1_12
Cohn, D., Hull, R.: Business artifacts: a data-centric approach to modeling business operations and processes. IEEE Data Eng. Bull. 32(3), 3–9 (2009)
Damaggio, E., Hull, R., Vaculín, R.: On the equivalence of incremental and fixpoint semantics for business artifacts with guard-stage-milestone lifecycles. Inf. Syst. 38(4), 561–584 (2013)
De Masellis, R., Di Francescomarino, C., Ghidini, C., Montali, M., Tessaris, S.: Add data into business process verification: bridging the gap between theory and practice. In: Singh, S.P., Markovitch, S. (eds.) Proceedings of AAAI, pp. 1091–1099 (2017)
Deutsch, A., Hull, R., Patrizi, F., Vianu, V.: Automatic verification of data-centric business processes. In: Proceedings of ICDT, pp. 252–267 (2009)
Dumas, M.: On the convergence of data and process engineering. In: Eder, J., Bielikova, M., Tjoa, A.M. (eds.) ADBIS 2011. LNCS, vol. 6909, pp. 19–26. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-23737-9_2
Hidders, J., Kwasnikowska, N., Sroka, J., Tyszkiewicz, J., Van den Bussche, J.: Dfl: a dataflow language based on petri nets and nested relational calculus. Inf. Syst. 33(3), 261–284 (2008)
Hull, R.: Artifact-centric business process models: brief survey of research results and challenges. In: Proceedings of ODBASE, pp. 1152–1163 (2008)
Jensen, K., Kristensen, L.M.: Coloured Petri Nets - Modelling and Validation of Concurrent Systems. Springer, Heidelberg (2009). doi:10.1007/b95112
Künzle, V., Weber, B., Reichert, M.: Object-aware business processes: fundamental requirements and their support in existing approaches. Int. J. Inf. Syst. Model. Des. 2(2), 19–46 (2011)
Lanti, D., Rezk, M., Xiao, G., Calvanese, D.: The NPD benchmark: Reality check for OBDA systems. In: Proceedings of EDBT, pp. 617–628 (2015). OpenProceedings.org
Lasota, S.: Decidability border for petri nets with data: WQO dichotomy conjecture. In: Kordon, F., Moldt, D. (eds.) PETRI NETS 2016. LNCS, vol. 9698, pp. 20–36. Springer, Cham (2016). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-39086-4_3
Libkin, L.: Elements of Finite Model Theory, LNCS, vol. 7360, chap. Fixed Point Logics and Complexity Classes. Springer (2004)
Lohmann, N.: Compliance by design for artifact-centric business processes. Inf. Syst. 38(4), 606–618 (2013)
Montali, M., Calvanese, D.: Soundness of data-aware, case-centric processes. Int. J. Software Tools Technol. Transf. 18, 535–558 (2016)
Montali, M., Rivkin, A.: Model checking petri nets with names using data-centric dynamic systems. Formal Aspects Comput. 28(4), 615–641 (2016)
Reichert, M.: Process and data: two sides of the same coin? In: Meersman, R., Panetto, H., Dillon, T., Rinderle-Ma, S., Dadam, P., Zhou, X., Pearson, S., Ferscha, A., Bergamaschi, S., Cruz, I.F. (eds.) OTM 2012. LNCS, vol. 7565, pp. 2–19. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-33606-5_2
Richardson, C.: Warning: don’t assume your business processes use master data. In: Hull, R., Mendling, J., Tai, S. (eds.) BPM 2010. LNCS, vol. 6336, pp. 11–12. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-15618-2_3
Rosa-Velardo, F., de Frutos-Escrig, D.: Decidability and complexity of petri nets with unordered data. Theor. Comput. Sci. 412(34), 4439–4451 (2011)
Russell, N., Hofstede, A.H.M., Edmond, D., der Aalst, W.M.P.: Workflow data patterns: identification, representation and tool support. In: Delcambre, L., Kop, C., Mayr, H.C., Mylopoulos, J., Pastor, O. (eds.) ER 2005. LNCS, vol. 3716, pp. 353–368. Springer, Heidelberg (2005). doi:10.1007/11568322_23
Triebel, M., Sürmeli, J.: Homogeneous equations of algebraic petri nets. In: Proceedings of CONCUR, pp. 1–14. LNCS, Springer (2016)
Vianu, V.: Automatic verification of database-driven systems: a new frontier. In: Proceedings of ICDT, pp. 1–13 (2009)
Acknowledgements
This research has been partially supported by the Euregio IPN12 “KAOS: Knowledge-Aware Operational Support” project, which is funded by the “European Region Tyrol-South Tyrol-Trentino” (EGTC) under the first call for basic research projects, and by the UNIBZ internal project “KENDO (Knowledge-driven ENterprise Distributed cOmputing)”.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Montali, M., Rivkin, A. (2017). DB-Nets: On the Marriage of Colored Petri Nets and Relational Databases. In: Koutny, M., Kleijn, J., Penczek, W. (eds) Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency XII. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10470. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-55862-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-55862-1_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-55861-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-55862-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)