A Rule-Based Language for Integrating Business Processes and Business Rules

Business process modeling has become a popular method for improving organizational efficiency and quality. Automatic validation of process models is one of the most valuable features of modeling tools, in face of the increasing complexity of enterprise business processes and the richness of modeling languages. This paper proposes a formal language, Event-Condition-Action-Event (ECAE), for integrating Colored Petri Nets (CPN)-based business process with a set of business rules. We automate the integration process for validating the business process model. The ECAE language has several important features: its reasoning capabilities, its ability to express complex actions and events, and its declarative semantics. By enabling simulation of business process behavior, the reasoning capabilities facilitate the early detection of flaws The widespread use of business process modeling has helped enterprises to design, control and analyze many operational processes. Unfortunately, syntactic and semantic inconsistencies often appear in business process models, especially as the complexity of the models increases. Flaw detection and automation are essential for ensuring cost-effective and correct process models. The challenge for system designers is to build a flexible intelligent system, which accepts and verifies the change on business process and business rules automatically. The business process must be integrated with a set of business rules, and a correspondence between the process and the rules must be created. This must be flexible since the business process and the business rules may be modified during runtime. The verification should be a rule-based system, which can reason and deduce new knowledge or a new decision based on a set of rules and facts. This paper proposes a formal language ECAE for business process modeling, which takes advantage of both the graphical representation of colored Petri nets and the easy to represent ECA rule. It designs a business process model through CPN and translates