Beyond Temporal Dependency: An Ontology-Based Approach to Modeling Causal Structures in Business Processes

Causality is an ubiquitous but elusive concept describing the relationship between cause and effect. In the context of business processes, it defines ontological, i.e., existential, and temporal dependencies between activities. Modeling languages define types of constraints and dependencies between activities. However, they mainly focus on the representation of the business process and the activity execution order without addressing the nature and type of activity interrelationships, i.e., its ontological profile. This paper proposes a new way of understanding activity relations through the fundamental distinction between temporal and ontological dependencies. Ten general types of activity interrelationships are derived covering all possible relationships between two activities in loop-free processes. They can be used as an aid in process redesign tasks, compliance checking, and to compare and analyze existing modeling approaches.