Authors:
Thomas Prinz
1
;
N. Long Ha
2
and
Yongsun Choi
3
Affiliations:
1
Course Evaluation Service, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany
;
2
Faculty of Economic Information Systems, University of Economics, Hue University, Vietnam
;
3
Department of Industrial and Management Engineering, Inje University, South Korea
Keyword(s):
Inclusive Semantics, OR-joins, Loops, Transformation, Loop Decomposition.
Abstract:
One aim of business process management is to automate business process models. Since process models shall reflect occurring processes in companies, such models can be complex and contain non-trivial behavior with inclusive semantics and loops formed by sequence flows. This paper shows on a test set that state-of-the-art BPMN execution engines do not fully support inclusive gateways, especially, if they are within loops. This circumstance prevents the one-to-one automation of process models. As there is no transformation of process models with inclusive semantics into models without them not risking the exponential growth of the models, this paper presents a transformation that decomposes cyclic process models into a set of message-exchanging acyclic process models. The transformed models are directly executable on most investigated engines. The transformation itself is achievable in quadratic time complexity, increases the size of the model just quadratically in the worst case, and,
finally, can be fully automated as pre-processing step before execution, thus avoiding to change execution engines.
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