Declarative business process modelling: principles and modelling languages

Abstract

The business process literature has proposed a multitude of business process modeling approaches or paradigms, each in response to a different business process type with a unique set of requirements. Two polar paradigms, i.e. the imperative and the declarative paradigm, appear to define the extreme positions on the paradigm spectrum. While imperative approaches focus on explicitly defining how an organizational goal should be reached, the declarative approaches focus on the directives, policies and regulations restricting the potential ways to achieve the organizational goal. In between, a variety of hybrid-paradigms can be distinguished, e.g. the advanced and adaptive case management.This paper focuses on the less exposed declarative approach on process modeling. An outline of the declarative process modeling and the modeling approaches is presented, followed by an overview of the observed declarative process modeling principles and an evaluation of the declarative process modeling approaches.

Towards a decision-aware declarative process modeling language for knowledge-intensive processes

“…In BPM there are two major modeling approaches: imperative and declarative process modeling (Fahland et al, 2009;Goedertier et al, 2015). Process modeling languages like BPMN (Object Management Group, 2013) and Petri nets (Murata, 1989;Petri, 1962) are examples of imperative modeling languages (also known as procedural languages).…”

“…Declarative process modeling languages like Declare (Pesic, 2008) and DCR graphs (Mukkamala, 2012) take the opposite viewpoint with an outside-in approach. Declarative languages describe the rules and constraints by which the process has to abide (Goedertier et al, 2015). The unwanted process variations are prohibited based on these rules and constraints, while all other variations are allowed without explicitly having to enumerate all valid variations (van der Aalst et al, 2009).…”

“…Generally, given the large number of allowed process variations in loosely framed processes, less effort will be required to describe the properties that make variations valid or invalid compared to enumerating all the valid process variations explicitly like imperative languages (Goedertier et al, 2015;van der Aalst, 2013).…”

“…Within business process modelling research, a hybrid language is used to signify the combination of imperative and declarative modeling languages into one approach (De Smedt, De Weerdt, Vanthienen, & Poels, 2016;Goedertier et al, 2015;Madhavji & Schafer, 1991;Maggi, Slaats, & Reijers, 2014;Sadiq, Orlowska, & Sadiq, 2005). So the question remains how this work compares to others that position themselves as hybrid modeling techniques.…”

“…Business process modeling is being applied in a variety of industries (e.g., manufacturing, insurance, utilities, retail, telecommunications, finance, etc.). As a result of the diversity in uses and target domains, a multitude of process modeling languages exist (Goedertier, Vanthienen, & Caron, 2015;Krogstie, 2013;Lu & Sadiq, 2007;van der Aalst, 2013). Gantt and flow charts were part of the first wave and have since given way to modern-day techniques like BPMN (White, 2004), UML activity diagrams (Object Management Group, 2015) and Declare (Pesic, 2008;van der Aalst, Pesic, & Schonenberg, 2009).…”