Abstracting Imperative Workflow to Declarative Business Rules

Lex Wedemeijer

2013

Abstract

Large business administrations rely on workflow systems to coordinate their business processes. In practice, workflow models are the blob-and-arc diagrams that outline required activities for dealing with an incoming event. In general however, user understanding is served better by the business rules approach. The Business Rules Manifesto advocates to express in declarative business rules what should be complied with, but to abstract from how to accomplish that by way of procedures. In this paper, we transform the main procedural components of imperative workflows to declarative business rules. The transformation results in two rules that still reflect the procedural nature of workflow, but more abstract than the corresponding workflow model. Once a workflow is transformed to declarative rules, these rules can be merged with other, content-aware business rules or pruned for unnecessary restrictions. The declarative rules and relations may capture business requirements about work processing better than blob-and-arc diagrams of imperative workflows.

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Wedemeijer L. (2013). Abstracting Imperative Workflow to Declarative Business Rules . In Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design - Volume 1: BMSD, ISBN 978-989-8565-56-3, pages 74-85. DOI: 10.5220/0004774200740085


in Bibtex Style

@conference{bmsd13,
author={Lex Wedemeijer},
title={Abstracting Imperative Workflow to Declarative Business Rules},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design - Volume 1: BMSD,},
year={2013},
pages={74-85},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004774200740085},
isbn={978-989-8565-56-3},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design - Volume 1: BMSD,
TI - Abstracting Imperative Workflow to Declarative Business Rules
SN - 978-989-8565-56-3
AU - Wedemeijer L.
PY - 2013
SP - 74
EP - 85
DO - 10.5220/0004774200740085