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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
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