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Mixed-Paradigm Process Modeling with Intertwined State Spaces

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An Erratum to this article was published on 07 January 2016

Abstract

Business process modeling often deals with the trade-off between comprehensibility and flexibility. Many languages have been proposed to support different paradigms to tackle these characteristics. Well-known procedural, token-based languages such as Petri nets, BPMN, EPC, etc. have been used and extended to incorporate more flexible use cases, however the declarative workflow paradigm, most notably represented by the Declare framework, is still widely accepted for modeling flexible processes. A real trade-off exists between the readable, rather inflexible procedural models, and the highly-expressive but cognitively demanding declarative models containing a lot of implicit behavior. This paper investigates in detail the scenarios in which combining both approaches is useful, it provides a scoring table for Declare constructs to capture their intricacies and similarities compared to procedural ones, and offers a step-wise approach to construct mixed-paradigm models. Such models are especially useful in the case of environments with different layers of flexibility and go beyond using atomic subprocesses modeled according to either paradigm. The paper combines Petri nets and Declare to express the findings.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KU Leuven Faculty of Economics and Business, Leuven Institute for Research on Information Systems, Naamsestraat 69, 3000, Louvain, Belgium

    Johannes De Smedt,  Jochen De Weerdt &  Jan Vanthienen

  2. UGent Management Information Systems Research Group, Ghent University Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Tweekerkenstraat 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Geert Poels

Authors
  1. Johannes De Smedt
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  2. Jochen De Weerdt
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  3. Jan Vanthienen
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  4. Geert Poels
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Correspondence to Johannes De Smedt.

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Accepted after two revisions by the editors of the special issue.

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De Smedt, J., De Weerdt, J., Vanthienen, J. et al. Mixed-Paradigm Process Modeling with Intertwined State Spaces. Bus Inf Syst Eng 58, 19–29 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-015-0416-y

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