EM-BrA2CE v0.1: A vocabulary and execution model for declarative business process modeling

In management theory of the last decades, much importance has been attached to a process-oriented perspective on organizational (re)structuring. Yet to date, organizations still experience difficulties in applying this process-oriented perspective to the design and maintenance information systems. The root of the problem lies with a procedural representation of business processes that contains inadequate information for computer systems to provide flexible automated business process support. The counterpart of a procedural representation is a declarative one that explicitly takes into account the business concerns that govern business processes. Recently, a number of process modeling languages have appeared that could be identified as declarative languages. These modeling languages have very distinct knowledge representation backgrounds, often lack a formal execution model and often only model one aspect of the many business concerns that exist in reality. What is needed are meaningful ways to combine several kinds of expressions, called business rule types, independently of the used methods for knowledge representation and reasoning. In this paper, we present the EM-BrACE (Enterprise Modeling using Business Rules, Agents, Activities, Concepts and Events) Framework, a unifying vocabulary and execution model for declarative process modeling. The vocabulary is described in terms of the Semantics for Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) standard and the execution model is presented as a Colored Petri Net (CP-Net). In addition, we show how declarative process models can contribute to the model-driven design of Service-Oriented Architectures. keywords: Business Process Management, Business Modeling, Service Modeling, SBVR, Service-Oriented Architecture