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Declarative process modelling languages focus on describing a process by restrictions over the behaviour, which must be satisfied throughout the whole process execution. Hence, they are well suited for modelling knowledge-intensive processes with many decision points. However, such models can be hard to read and understand, which affect the modelling and maintenance of the process models tremendously as well as their execution. When executing such declarative (multi-perspective) process models, it may happen that the execution of activities or the change of data values may result in the non-executability of crucial activities. Hence, it would be beneficial to know all consequences of decisions to give recommendations to the process participants. A look-ahead attempts to predict the effects of executing an activity towards possible consequences within an a priori defined time window. The prediction is based on the current state of the process execution, the intended next event and the underlying process model. While execution engines for single-perspective imperative process models already implement such functionality, execution approaches, for multi-perspective declarative process models that involve constraints on data and resources, are less mature. In this paper, we introduce a simulation-based look-ahead approach for multi-perspective declarative process models. This approach transforms the problem of a context-aware process simulation into a SAT problem, by translating a declarative multi-perspective process model and the current state of a process execution into a specification of the logic language Alloy. Via a SAT solver, process trajectories are generated that either satisfy or violate this specification. The simulated process trajectories are used to derive consequences and effects of certain decisions at any time of process execution. We evaluate our approach by means of three examples and give some advice for further optimizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business process modelling languages typically enable the representation of business process models by employing (graphical) symbols. These symbols can vary depending upon the verbosity of the language, the modelling paradigm, the focus of the language and so on. To make explicit different constructs and rules employed by a specific language, as well as bridge the gap across different languages, meta-models have been proposed in the literature. These meta-models are a crucial source of knowledge on what state-of-the-art literature considers relevant to describe business processes. The goal of this work is to provide the first extensive systematic literature review (SLR) of business process meta-models. This SLR aims to answer research questions concerning: (1) the kind of meta-models proposed in the literature, (2) the recurring constructs they contain, (3) their purposes and (4) their evaluations. The SRL was performed manually considering papers automatically retrieved from reference paper repositories as well as proceedings of the main conferences in the Business Process Management research area. Sixty-five papers were selected and evaluated against four research questions. The results indicate the existence of a reasonable body of work conducted in this specific area, but not a full maturity. In particular, in answering the research questions several challenges have (re-)emerged for the Business Process Community, concerning: (1) the type of elements that constitute a Business Process and their meaning, (2) the absence of a (or several) reference meta-model(s) for the community, (3) the purpose for which meta-models are introduced in the literature and (4) a framework for the evaluation of the meta-models themselves. Moreover, the classification framework devised to answer the four research questions can provide a reference structure for future descriptive categorizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mature verification and monitoring approaches, such as complex event processing and model checking, can be applied for checking compliance specifications at design time and runtime. Little is known about the understandability of the different formal and technical languages associated with these approaches. This uncertainty regarding understandability might be a major obstacle for the broad practical adoption of those techniques. This article reports a controlled experiment with 215 participants on the understandability of modeling compliance specifications in representative modeling languages, namely linear temporal logic (LTL), the complex event processing-based event processing language (EPL) and property specification patterns (PSP). The formalizations in PSP were overall more correct. That is, the pattern-based approach provides a higher level of understandability than EPL and LTL. More advanced users, however, seemingly are able to cope equally well with PSP and EPL in modeling compliance specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern software development, much time is devoted and much attention is paid to the activity of data modeling and the translation of data models into databases. This has motivated the proposal of different approaches and tools to support this activity, such as semiautomatic approaches that generate data models from requirements artifacts using text analysis and sets of heuristics, among other techniques. However, these approaches still suffer from important limitations, including the lack of support for requirements traceability, the poor support for detecting and solving conflicts in domain-specific requirements, and the considerable effort required for manually checking the generated models. This paper introduces DataMock, an Agile approach that enables the iterative building of data models from requirements specifications, while supporting traceability and allowing inconsistencies detection in data requirements and specifications. The paper also describes how the approach effectively allows improving traceability and reducing errors and effort to build data models in comparison with traditional, state-of-the-art, data modeling approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's enterprises demand a high degree of compliance of business processes to meet diverse regulations and legislations. Several industrial studies have shown that compliance management is a daunting task, and organizations are still struggling and spending billions of dollars annually to ensure and prove their compliance. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive compliance management framework with a main focus on design-time compliance management as a first step towards a preventive lifetime compliance support. The framework enables the automation of compliance-related activities that are amenable to automation, and therefore can significantly reduce the expenditures spent on compliance. It can help experts to carry out their work more efficiently, cut the time spent on tedious manual activities, and reduce potential human errors. An evident candidate compliance activity for automation is the compliance checking, which can be achieved by utilizing formal reasoning and verification techniques. However, formal languages are well known of their complexity as only versed users in mathematical theories and formal logics are able to use and understand them. However, this is generally not the case with business and compliance practitioners. Therefore, in the heart of the compliance management framework, we introduce the Compliance Request Language (CRL), which is formally grounded on temporal logic and enables the abstract pattern-based specification of compliance requirements. CRL constitutes a series of compliance patterns that spans three structural facets of business processes; control flow, employed resources and temporal perspectives. Furthermore, CRL supports the specification of compensations and non-monotonic requirements, which permit the relaxation of some compliance requirements to handle exceptional situations. An integrated tool suite has been developed as an instantiation artefact, and the validation of the approach is undertaken in several directions, which includes internal validity, controlled experiments, and functional testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a widely-used standard for process modelling. A drawback of BPMN, however, is that modality is implicitly expressed through the structure of the process flow but not directly within the corresponding activity. Thus, an extension of BPMN with deontic logic has been proposed in previous work, called Deontic BPMN. Deontic BPMN reduces the structural complexity of the process flow and increases the readability by explicitly highlighting obligatory and permissible activities. In addition, an algebraic graph transformation from a subset of BPMN to Deontic BPMN, called Deontic BpmnGTS, has been defined. The goal of the current research is to show that DeonticBpmnGTS is terminating and confluent, resulting in a globally deterministic transformation. Moreover, the semantic equivalence of BPMN models and the respective Deontic BPMN models is proven based on Abstract State Machines (ASMs). Thus, DeonticBpmnGTS can be called a trusted model transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In model-driven software engineering, model transformation plays a key role for automatically generating and updating models. Transformation rules define how source model elements are to be transformed into target model elements. However, defining transformation rules is a complex task, especially in situations where semantic differences or incompleteness allow for alternative interpretations or where models change continuously before and after transformation. This paper proposes constraint-driven modeling where transformation is used to generate constraints on the target model rather than the target model itself. We evaluated the approach on three case studies that address the above difficulties and other common transformation issues. We also developed a proof-of-concept implementation that demonstrates its feasibility. The implementation suggests that constraint-driven transformation is an efficient and scalable alternative and/or complement to traditional transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]