Concurrency and asynchrony in declarative workflows

Søren Debois; Thomas Hildebrandt; Tijs Slaats

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-23063-4_5

Concurrency and asynchrony in declarative workflows

Søren Debois, Thomas Hildebrandt, Tijs Slaats

11 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original language	Undefined/Unknown
Title of host publication	Business Process Management : 13th International Conference, BPM 2015; Innsbruck; Austria; 31 August 2015 through 3 September 2015
Editors	J. Recker, M. Weidlich, H. R. Motahari-Nezhad
Number of pages	18
Publisher	Springer
Publication date	2015
Pages	72-89
ISBN (Print)	978-331923062-7
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23063-4_5
Publication status	Published - 2015
Externally published	Yes
Event	13th International Conference on Business Process Management - Innsbruck, Austria Duration: 31 Aug 2015 → 3 Sept 2015 Conference number: 13

Conference

Conference	13th International Conference on Business Process Management
Number	13
Country/Territory	Austria
City	Innsbruck
Period	31/08/2015 → 03/09/2015

Series	Lecture notes in computer science
Volume	9253
ISSN	0302-9743

Access to Document

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

Cite this

Concurrency and asynchrony in declarative workflows. / Debois, Søren; Hildebrandt, Thomas; Slaats, Tijs.
Business Process Management: 13th International Conference, BPM 2015; Innsbruck; Austria; 31 August 2015 through 3 September 2015. ed. / J. Recker; M. Weidlich; H. R. Motahari-Nezhad. Springer, 2015. p. 72-89 (Lecture notes in computer science, Vol. 9253).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Article in proceedings › Research › peer-review

Debois, S, Hildebrandt, T & Slaats, T 2015, Concurrency and asynchrony in declarative workflows. in J Recker, M Weidlich & HR Motahari-Nezhad (eds), Business Process Management: 13th International Conference, BPM 2015; Innsbruck; Austria; 31 August 2015 through 3 September 2015. Springer, Lecture notes in computer science, vol. 9253, pp. 72-89, 13th International Conference on Business Process Management, Innsbruck, Austria, 31/08/2015. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23063-4_5

Debois S, Hildebrandt T, Slaats T. Concurrency and asynchrony in declarative workflows. In Recker J, Weidlich M, Motahari-Nezhad HR, editors, Business Process Management: 13th International Conference, BPM 2015; Innsbruck; Austria; 31 August 2015 through 3 September 2015. Springer. 2015. p. 72-89. (Lecture notes in computer science, Vol. 9253). doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-23063-4_5

Debois, Søren ; Hildebrandt, Thomas ; Slaats, Tijs. / Concurrency and asynchrony in declarative workflows. Business Process Management: 13th International Conference, BPM 2015; Innsbruck; Austria; 31 August 2015 through 3 September 2015. editor / J. Recker ; M. Weidlich ; H. R. Motahari-Nezhad. Springer, 2015. pp. 72-89 (Lecture notes in computer science, Vol. 9253).

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