Transformation of Cyclic Process Models with Inclusive Gateways to Be Executable on State-of-the-Art Engines

Thomas Prinz, N. Long Ha, Yongsun Choi

2025

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.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Prinz T., Ha N. and Choi Y. (2025). Transformation of Cyclic Process Models with Inclusive Gateways to Be Executable on State-of-the-Art Engines. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS; ISBN 978-989-758-749-8, SciTePress, pages 280-291. DOI: 10.5220/0013386400003929

in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis25,
author={Thomas Prinz and N. Ha and Yongsun Choi},
title={Transformation of Cyclic Process Models with Inclusive Gateways to Be Executable on State-of-the-Art Engines},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS},
year={2025},
pages={280-291},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013386400003929},
isbn={978-989-758-749-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS
TI - Transformation of Cyclic Process Models with Inclusive Gateways to Be Executable on State-of-the-Art Engines
SN - 978-989-758-749-8
AU - Prinz T.
AU - Ha N.
AU - Choi Y.
PY - 2025
SP - 280
EP - 291
DO - 10.5220/0013386400003929
PB - SciTePress