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ANALYZING DECENTRALIZED GOVERNABILITY OF BUSINESS
PROCESSES BY EXTENDED PETRI NETS AND MODAL LOGICS
Takashi Hattori
NTT Communication Science Laboratories, 2-4, Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto, Japan
Hiroshi Kawakami, Osamu Katai, Takayuki Shiose
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo, Kyoto, Japan
Keywords:
Decentralized Control, Discrete Event System, Petri Net, Modal Logic.
Abstract:
We introduce a novel notion of decentralized governance structure of event-driven processes together with
the notions of their behavioral and structural correctness. The ways for attaining correct process behavior, as
well as the notion of decentralized governability, are examined based on temporal logical analyses of process
behavior via Petri net representations of process structures. Also, the deontic and temporal logical prescrip-
tions of normative constraints (tasks) on the processes are introduced that are then translated into extended
hierarchical Petri net structures. The conflicts among these tasks are examined on this hierarchical structure.
1 INTRODUCTION
As e-businesses grow, users have gained power in
obtaining information and combining various service
applications. For instance, if a user decides to go on
a trip, s/he may use an access map, train informa-
tion, a hotel search, and a defrayment service. Thus,
users are nowadays active, unlikethose of the past that
only passively followed the line prepared by service
providers. In other words, a single service provider is
not as powerful now as before, and processes are not
as centralized as before.
This paper proposes a theoretical framework for
such decentralized multi-agent (in this case, users and
service providers) systems that can represent agents’
behavior and their policies or control rules. The be-
haviors of agents are represented by a Petri net (Pe-
terson, 1981), which offers rich mathematical analy-
sis, and introducing modal logics (Hughes and Cress-
well, 1968) enables us to represent policies and con-
trol rules. It is known that a Petri net is conventional
and now its successors, e.g., a Unified Modeling Lan-
guage (UML) (Saldhana and Shatz, 2000), are popu-
lar tools for system modeling. Applying a Petri net is
still a hot topic for those researchers that place empha-
sis on checking the behavior of system design (Hu and
Shatz, 2004). Modal logics, e.g., temporal and deon-
tic logics, are also known as conventional theories.
They have been applied to several systems (Black-
burn et al., 2006) and their theoretical studies still
progress (Nute, 2004).
For further development of e-business, decentral-
ized governance is inevitable. Growing numbers of
services and applications may lead to overlap of ser-
vices, which may sometimes cause interference. Our
framework enables us to check the existence of inter-
ference among services’ control and user’s policies.
Furthermore, it shows us how to eliminate the inter-
ference.
The rest of this paper consists of the followingsec-
tions. Section 2 introduces the outline of the frame-
work. In this framework, components of a target sys-
tem are classified into two portions from the view-
point of whether it is a prefixed structural element or
an element that may change over time like users’ poli-
cies and service providers’ control rules. The former
portion is encoded into a conventional Petri net. The
latter half is first represented by modal logic formulae,
which are then translated into extended Petri nets that
we call “task unit graphs.” The two portions are then
integrated into a single extended Petri net. In section
3, the framework introduced in section 2 is applied to
the modeling of decentralized governance problems.
Based on the model, we discuss the correctness of
process behavior and centralized/decentralized gov-
ernability in sections 4 and 5.
29
Hattori T., Kawakami H., Katai O. and Shiose T. (2008).
ANALYZING DECENTRALIZED GOVERNABILITY OF BUSINESS PROCESSES BY EXTENDED PETRI NETS AND MODAL LOGICS.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business, pages 29-36
DOI: 10.5220/0001907500290036
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