A projection-stable grammatical model for the distributed execution of administrative processes with emphasis on actors’ views

Abstract

In Business Process Management, the decentralized execution of business processes is one of the main research topics. Several models for processes’ modelling in order to facilitate their execution, have been proposed. LSAWfP is among the most recent in this area: it helps to specify administrative processes with grammatical models indicating, in addition to their fundamental elements, the permissions (reading, writing and execution) of each actor in relation to tasks. In this paper, we present a model for a completely decentralized execution of processes specified using LSAWfP. The presented model puts emphasis on actors’ views: it then allows the confidential execution of certain tasks by ensuring that, each actor potentially has a partial perception of the processes’ states. The model thus solves an often sidelined problem in business process execution. To accomplish this, it relies on three projection algorithms allowing to partially replicate the processes’ global execution states (artifact projection algorithm), to consistently update the obtained partial states (model projection algorithm) and to deduce new coherent global states (expansion-pruning algorithm). The proposal of these algorithms, the proof of underlying mathematical tools’ stability and a proposal of their implementation, are this paper’s contributions.

Keywords

• Administrative Processes
• Projection
• Grammars
• Views
• LSAWfP