A rule-based approach to model and verify flexible business processes

Efficient organisations need to ensure that their business processes are flexible so that these processes can easily accommodate changes in regulations and policies. Appropriate techniques to model and verify these processes are required. In this paper, we present a rule-based approach, which is built upon the event-condition-action model (ECA) and supported by a rule-based business process definition language (RbBPDL). In this approach, rules, which specify business processes, are represented using the event-condition-action-post-condition-event (ECAPE) model. This allows translating a process into a graph of rules that is used to check how flexible a business process is, and estimating this process’s cost of changes. This cost is based on a rule change cost model (R2CM) that will be presented in this paper. In addition, the ECAPE model allows the translation of a process into a coloured Petri net, called ECAPE net, in order to verify process functioning prior to any deployment.