Concurrency and asynchrony in declarative workflows

TY - GEN

T1 - Concurrency and asynchrony in declarative workflows

AU - Debois, Søren

AU - Hildebrandt, Thomas

AU - Slaats, Tijs

N1 - Conference code: 13

PY - 2015

Y1 - 2015

N2 - Declarative or constraint-based business process and workflow notations, in particular DECLARE and Dynamic Condition Response (DCR) graphs, have received increasing interest in the last decade as possible means of addressing the challenge of supporting at the same time flexibility in execution, adaptability and compliance. However, the definition of concurrent semantics, which is a necessary foundation for asynchronously executing distributed processes, is not obvious for formalisms such as DECLARE and DCR Graphs. This is in stark contrast to the very successful Petri-net–based process languages, which have an inherent notion of concurrency. In this paper, we propose a notion of concurrency for declarative process models, formulated in the context of DCR graphs, and exploiting the so-called “true concurrency” semantics of Labelled Asynchronous Transition Systems. We demonstrate how this semantic underpinning of concurrency in DCR Graphs admits asynchronous execution of declarative workflows both conceptually and by reporting on a prototype implementation of a distributed declarative workflow engine. Both the theoretical development and the implementation is supported by an extended example; moreover, the theoretical development has been verified correct in the Isabelle-HOL interactive theorem prover.

AB - Declarative or constraint-based business process and workflow notations, in particular DECLARE and Dynamic Condition Response (DCR) graphs, have received increasing interest in the last decade as possible means of addressing the challenge of supporting at the same time flexibility in execution, adaptability and compliance. However, the definition of concurrent semantics, which is a necessary foundation for asynchronously executing distributed processes, is not obvious for formalisms such as DECLARE and DCR Graphs. This is in stark contrast to the very successful Petri-net–based process languages, which have an inherent notion of concurrency. In this paper, we propose a notion of concurrency for declarative process models, formulated in the context of DCR graphs, and exploiting the so-called “true concurrency” semantics of Labelled Asynchronous Transition Systems. We demonstrate how this semantic underpinning of concurrency in DCR Graphs admits asynchronous execution of declarative workflows both conceptually and by reporting on a prototype implementation of a distributed declarative workflow engine. Both the theoretical development and the implementation is supported by an extended example; moreover, the theoretical development has been verified correct in the Isabelle-HOL interactive theorem prover.

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-23063-4_5

DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-23063-4_5

M3 - Konferencebidrag i proceedings

SN - 978-331923062-7

T3 - Lecture notes in computer science

SP - 72

EP - 89

BT - Business Process Management

A2 - Recker, J.

A2 - Weidlich, M.

A2 - Motahari-Nezhad, H. R.

PB - Springer

T2 - 13th International Conference on Business Process Management

Y2 - 31 August 2015 through 3 September 2015

ER -