Business Process Modeling in Abstract Logic Tree

Business process models are usually defined in a graphical modeling language. Most business process modeling languages are the analog of flow chart and UML Activity Diagram, which allows unstructured flow structures. Unstructured process models make it difficult to transform it to a structured business process model, such as BPEL4WS. This paper proposes to represents the structure of a business process model with a special tree structure, Abstract Logic Tree. The concept and approach of Abstract Syntax Tree of programming language field is suggested to be applied to business process modeling field in this paper. Several graph transformation rules are developed for the transformation from an unstructured process model to an ALT. Detecting unstructured loops is the critical point for the transformation. DJ Graph is used to detect unstructured loops in this paper. The equivalence between a process model and its ALT is proven. The efforts in the paper make the analysis and manipulation against process models can be easily done on tree-based internal representation. ALT can be regarded as a foundation for parsing the structure and analyzing structure properties of business process models.

By: Ying Liu; Jian Wang; Jun Zhu; Haiqi Liang; Zhong Tian; Wei Sun

Published in: RC23444 in 2004

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