Formal Model of Business Processes Integrated with Business Rules

• Published in: Information systems frontiers Vol. 21; no. 5; pp. 1167 - 1185
• Main Authors: Kluza, Krzysztof, Nalepa, Grzegorz J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01-10-2019; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Business; Business and Management; Business process reengineering; Control; Information systems; IT in Business; Knowledge engineering; Knowledge representation; Management of Computing and Information Systems; Operations Research/Decision Theory; Semantics; Specifications; Systems Theory; Business rules; Business process modeling; Process with rules integration
• ISSN: 1387-3326; 1572-9419
• DOI: 10.1007/s10796-018-9826-y

Business Processes describe the ways in which operations are carried out in order to accomplish the intended objectives of organizations. A process can be depicted using a modeling notation, such as Business Process Model and Notation. Process model can also describe operational aspects of every task; but in a properly designed model, the detailed aspects of low-level logic should be delegated to external services, especially to a Business Rule Engine. Business Rules support the specification of knowledge in a declarative manner and can be successfully used for specification of details for process tasks and events. However, there is no unified model of process integrated with rules that ensures data types consistency. Thus, the paper presents a formal description of the integration of Business Processes with Business Rules. We provide a general model for such integration as well as the model applied to a specific rule representation from the Semantic Knowledge Engineering approach.