Declarative Event-Based Workflow as Distributed Dynamic Condition Response Graphs

• Main Authors: Thomas T. Hildebrandt, Raghava Rao Mukkamala
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Publishing Association 2011-10-01
• Series: Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science
• Online Access: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.4161v1

We present Dynamic Condition Response Graphs (DCR Graphs) as a declarative, event-based process model inspired by the workflow language employed by our industrial partner and conservatively generalizing prime event structures. A dynamic condition response graph is a directed graph with nodes representing the events that can happen and arrows representing four relations between events: condition, response, include, and exclude. Distributed DCR Graphs is then obtained by assigning roles to events and principals. We give a graphical notation inspired by related work by van der Aalst et al. We exemplify the use of distributed DCR Graphs on a simple workflow taken from a field study at a Danish hospital, pointing out their flexibility compared to imperative workflow models. Finally we provide a mapping from DCR Graphs to Buchi-automata.