A Grammatical Model for the Specification of Administrative Workflow Using Scenario as Modelling Unit

Abstract

Process modelling is a crucial phase of Business Process Management (BPM). Despite the many efforts made in producing process modelling tools, existing tools (languages) are not commonly accepted. They are mainly criticised for their inability to specify both the tasks making up the processes and their scheduling (their lifecycle models), the data they manipulate (their information models) and their organizational models. Process modelling in these languages often results in a single task graph; such a graph can quickly become difficult to read and maintain. Moreover, these languages are often too general (they have a very high expressiveness); this makes their application to specific types of processes complex: especially for administrative processes. In this paper, we present a new language for administrative processes modelling that allows designers to specify the lifecycle, information and organizational models of such processes using a mathematical tool based on a variant of attributed grammars. The approach imposed by the new language requires the designer to subdivide his process into scenarios, then to model each scenario individually using a simple task graph (an annotated tree) from which a grammatical model is further derived. At each moment then, the designer manipulates only a scenario of the studied process: this approach is more intuitive and modular; it allows to produce task graphs that are more refined and therefore, more readable and easier to maintain.

Non-Recursive LSAWfP Models are Structured Workflows

“…We are interested in non-recursive LSAWfP models because they are the subclass of LSAWfP models in which activities are joined in a non-arbitrary way, using GMWf productions; this is actually their common point with structured workflows. Despite the fact that non-recursive LSAWfP models do not directly express iterative routing between process activities, they are useful in several practical cases; especially for administrative processes in which the recursivity (the number of repetitions) is generally bounded [11].…”

A Language and Methodology based on Scenarios, Grammars and Views, for Administrative Business Processes Modelling

“…In the ADEPT multi-agent system, process logic is expressed in the so-called service definition language (SDL); the resulting model is such as at runtime, agents have sufficient freedom to take alternative execution paths (from the model) to complete the process goal. As mentioned in the introduction, for the last two decades, a lot of work on process modelling has been done on the artifact-centric paradigm [6,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]. This paradigm was introduced by IBM through the work of Nigam and Caswell [6].…”

“…As running example, we will use the peer-review process. A brief description of it inspired by those made in [7,23,25,26], can be the following one:…”