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Vol: 47(61) No: 1 / March 2002 Business Process Modeling in INSPIRE Using Petri Nets Costin Badica Department of Computer Science, King’s College London, Strand, WC2R 2LS, London, UK, e-mail: badica@dcs.kcl.ac.uk Marius Brezovan Faculty of Automatics, Computers and Electronics, University of Craiova, str.Lapus, nr.5, RO-1100, Craiova, Romania, e-mail: Marius.Brezovan@aeic.ro Chris Fox Department of Computer Science, University of Essex, CO4 3SQ, Colchester, UK, e-mail: foxcj@essex.ac.uk Keywords: business process, Petri net, formal specification. Abstract This paper introduces a notation for business process modeling and shows how it can be formally interpreted in terms of Petri nets. Petri nets have a quite respectable research community, which is 35 years old. However, they were only recently proposed for business process modeling. This is probably due to the fact they are often claimed to be “too complex” for this task. Nevertheless, they are quite well understood and the theory behind them is well developed, so we think they have a good potential for business process modeling, but more work needs to be done. In this paper we show that Petri nets can help in understanding formally the business process modeling notation developed in the Inspire project. This understanding can act as a basis for a future work on formal analysis of business process models developed with the INSPIRE tool. The Inspire project (IST-10387-1999) aims to develop an integrated tool-set to support a systematic and more human-oriented approach to business process re-engineering. References [1] M. Ould,, Business Processes: Modeling and Analysis for Re-engineering and Improvement, John Wiley & Sons, 1995. [2] C. Fox, “The process representation module (specification)”, INSPIRE (IST-1999-10387) Deliverable 2.1, 2000. [3] Draft Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 183, Integration Definition for Function Modeling (IDEF0), 1993. [4] R. Mayer et al., Information Integration for Concurrent Engineering (IICE): IDEF3 Process Description Capture Method Report, 1993. [5] C. Badica, C. Fox, ²Modeling and verification of business processes² unpublished. [6] M. Schroeder, ²Verification of business processes for a correspondence handling center using CCS², Proc. European Symposium on Validation and Verification of Knowledge Based Systems and Components, Oslo, Norway, pp.253-264, 1999. [7] E. Yu, J. J. Mylopoulos, Y. Lesprance, “AI models for business process re-engineering”, IEEE Expert, 11(4), pp.16-23, 1996. [8] W.M.P. van der Aalst, “The Application of Petri nets to workflow management”, The Journal of Circuits, Systems and Computers, 8(1), pp.21-66, 1998. [9] J. Desel, J. Esparza, Free Choice Petri Nets, Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science 40, Cambridge University Press, 1995. |