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On enabling integrated process compliance with semantic constraints in process management systems

Requirements, challenges, solutions

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Abstract

Key to broad use of process management systems (PrMS) in practice is their ability to foster and ease the implementation, execution, monitoring, and adaptation of business processes while still being able to ensure robust and error-free process enactment. To meet these demands a variety of mechanisms has been developed to prevent errors at the structural level (e.g., deadlocks). In many application domains, however, processes often have to comply with business level rules and policies (i.e., semantic constraints) as well. Hence, to ensure error-free executions at the semantic level, PrMS need certain control mechanisms for validating and ensuring the compliance with semantic constraints. In this paper, we discuss fundamental requirements for a comprehensive support of semantic constraints in PrMS. Moreover, we provide a survey on existing approaches and discuss to what extent they are able to meet the requirements and which challenges still have to be tackled. In order to tackle the particular challenge of providing integrated compliance support over the process lifecycle, we introduce the SeaFlows framework. The framework introduces a behavioural level view on processes which serves a conceptual process representation for constraint specification approaches. Further, it provides general compliance criteria for static compliance validation but also for dealing with process changes. Altogether, the SeaFlows framework can serve as formal basis for realizing integrated support of semantic constraints in PrMS.

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Notes

  1. \(\tilde{\sigma}\bar{\sigma}\) denotes the concatenation of \(\tilde{\sigma}\) and \(\bar{\sigma}\).

  2. \(\tilde{\sigma} \Delta_e \breve{\sigma}\) denotes the concatenation of \(\tilde{\sigma}\), Δ e , and \(\breve{\sigma}\).

  3. \(\tilde{\sigma} \Delta_e \) denotes the concatenation of \(\tilde{\sigma}\) and Δ e .

  4. We assume that reparational actions are also incorporated into the constraints as it is possible with FCL (Governatori et al. 2006; Governatori 2005).

  5. www.aristaflow.com www.uni-ulm.de/en/in/iui-dbis/research/projects/adept2.html

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our students Heiko Fröhlich, Philipp Merkel, Barbara Panzer, and Andreas Pröbstle for implementing the SeaFlows prototype presented in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Databases and Information Systems, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany

    Linh Thao Ly, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma & Peter Dadam

  2. AristaFlow GmbH, Ulm, Germany

    Kevin Göser

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  1. Linh Thao Ly
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  2. Stefanie Rinderle-Ma
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  3. Kevin Göser
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  4. Peter Dadam
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Correspondence to Linh Thao Ly.

Additional information

This work was done within the research project “SeaFlows: Semantic Constraints in Process Management Systems”, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). http://www.uni-ulm.de/en/in/iui-dbis/research/projects/seaflows.html

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Ly, L.T., Rinderle-Ma, S., Göser, K. et al. On enabling integrated process compliance with semantic constraints in process management systems. Inf Syst Front 14, 195–219 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-009-9185-9

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