Hybrid business process modeling for the optimization of outcome data

Context: Declarative business processes are commonly used to describe permitted and prohibited actions in a business process. However, most current proposals of declarative languages fail in three aspects: (1) they tend to be oriented only towards the execution order of the activities; (2) the optimization is oriented only towards the minimization of the execution time or the resources used in the business process; and (3) there is an absence of capacity of execution of declarative models in commercial Business Process Management Systems. Objective: This contribution aims at taking into account these three aspects, by means of: (1) the formalization of a hybrid model oriented towards obtaining the outcome data optimization by combining a data-oriented declarative specification and a control-flow-oriented imperative specification; and (2) the automatic creation from this hybrid model to an imperative model that is executable in a standard Business Process Management System. Method: An approach, based on the definition of a hybrid business process, which uses a constraint programming paradigm, is presented. This approach enables the optimized outcome data to be obtained at runtime for the various instances. Results: A language capable of defining a hybrid model is provided, and applied to a case study. Likewise, the automatic creation of an executable constraint satisfaction problem is addressed, whose resolution allows us to attain the optimized outcome data. A brief computational study is also shown. Conclusion: A hybrid business process is defined for the specification of the relationships between declarative data and control-flow imperative components of a business process. In addition, the way in which this hybrid model automatically creates an entirely imperative model at design time is also defined. The resulting imperative model, executable in any commercial Business Process Management System, can obtain, at execution time, the optimized outcome data of the process. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.