Skip to main content

Modeling and In-Database Management of Relational, Data-Aware Processes

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11483))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

It is known that the engineering of information systems usually requires a huge effort in integrating master data and business processes. Existing approaches, both from academia and the industry, typically come with ad-hoc abstractions to represent and interact with the data component. This has two disadvantages: (i) an existing database (DB) cannot be effortlessly enriched with dynamics; (ii) such approaches generally do not allow for integrated modelling, verification, and enactment. We attack these two challenges by proposing a declarative approach, fully grounded in SQL, that supports the agile modelling of relational data-aware processes directly on top of relational DBs. We show how this approach can be automatically translated into a concrete procedural SQL dialect, executable directly inside any relational DB engine. The translation exploits an in-database representation of process states that, in turn, is used to handle, at once, process enactment with or without logging of the executed instances, as well as process verification. The approach has been implemented in a working prototype.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Even in the presence of this bound, infinitely many different DBs can be encountered, by changing the values stored therein.

References

  1. Hariri, B.B., Calvanese, D., De Giacomo, G., Deutsch, A., Montali, M.: Verification of relational data-centric dynamic systems with external services. In: Proceedings of PODS (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Belardinelli, F., Lomuscio, A., Patrizi, F.: Verification of agent-based artifact systems. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 51, 333–376 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1613/jair.4424

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  3. Calvanese, D., De Giacomo, G., Montali, M.: Foundations of data aware process analysis: a database theory perspective. In: Proceedings of PODS (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Calvanese, D., De Giacomo, G., Montali, M., Patrizi, F.: FO \(\mu \)-calculus over generic transition systems and applications to the situation calculus. Inf. Comp. 259(3), 328–347 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Calvanese, D., Montali, M., Patrizi, F., Rivkin, A.: Modelling and enactment of data-aware processes. CoRR abs/1810.08062 (2018). http://arxiv.org/abs/1810.08062

  6. Damaggio, E., Hull, R., Vaculín, R.: On the Equivalence of incremental and fixpoint semantics for business artifacts with guard-stage-milestone lifecycles. In: Rinderle-Ma, S., Toumani, F., Wolf, K. (eds.) BPM 2011. LNCS, vol. 6896, pp. 396–412. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23059-2_29

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  7. De Masellis, R., Di Francescomarino, C., Ghidini, C., Montali, M., Tessaris, S.: Add data into business process verification: bridging the gap between theory and practice. In: Proceedings of AAAI. AAAI Press (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Dumas, M.: On the convergence of data and process engineering. In: Eder, J., Bielikova, M., Tjoa, A.M. (eds.) ADBIS 2011. LNCS, vol. 6909, pp. 19–26. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23737-9_2

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  9. Furtado, A.L., Casanova, M.A.: Updating relational views. In: Kim, W., Reiner, D.S., Batory, D.S. (eds.) Query Processing in Database Systems. Topics in Information Systems, pp. 127–142. Springer, Heidelberg (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-82375-6_7

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  10. Hull, R.: Artifact-centric business process models: brief survey of research results and challenges. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds.) OTM 2008. LNCS, vol. 5332, pp. 1152–1163. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88873-4_17

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Köpke, J., Su, J.: Towards quality-aware translations of activity-centric processes to guard stage milestone. In: La Rosa, M., Loos, P., Pastor, O. (eds.) BPM 2016. LNCS, vol. 9850, pp. 308–325. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45348-4_18

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  12. Künzle, V., Weber, B., Reichert, M.: Object-aware business processes: Fundamental requirements and their support in existing approaches. Int. J. Inf. Syst. Model. Des. 2(2), 19–46 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Li, Y., Deutsch, A., Vianu, V.: VERIFAS: a practical verifier for artifact systems. PVLDB 11(3), 283–296 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Montali, M., Calvanese, D.: Soundness of data-aware, case-centric processes. Int. J. Softw. Tools Technol. Transf. 18(5), 535–558 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Montali, M., Rivkin, A.: Model checking Petri nets with names using data-centric dynamic systems. Formal Aspects Comput. 28, 615–641 (2016)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  16. Montali, M., Rivkin, A.: DB-Nets: on the marriage of colored Petri Nets and relational databases. In: Koutny, M., Kleijn, J., Penczek, W. (eds.) Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency XII. LNCS, vol. 10470, pp. 91–118. Springer, Heidelberg (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-55862-1_5

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  17. Olivé, A.: Conceptual Modeling of Information Systems. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39390-0

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  18. Reichert, M.: Process and data: two sides of the same coin? In: Meersman, R., et al. (eds.) OTM 2012. LNCS, vol. 7565, pp. 2–19. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33606-5_2

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  19. Seco, J.C., Debois, S., Hildebrandt, T.T., Slaats, T.: RESEDA: declaring live event-driven computations as reactive semi-structured data. In: Proceedings of EDOC, pp. 75–84 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Solomakhin, D., Montali, M., Tessaris, S., De Masellis, R.: Verification of artifact-centric systems: decidability and modeling issues. In: Basu, S., Pautasso, C., Zhang, L., Fu, X. (eds.) ICSOC 2013. LNCS, vol. 8274, pp. 252–266. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45005-1_18

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  21. Sun, Y., Su, J., Wu, B., Yang, J.: Modeling data for business processes. In: Proceedings of ICDE, pp. 1048–1059. IEEE Computer Society (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Sun, Y., Su, J., Yang, J.: Universal artifacts: a new approach to business process management (BPM) systems. ACM TMIS 7(1), 3 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Xu, W., Su, J., Yan, Z., Yang, J., Zhang, L.: An artifact-centric approach to dynamic modification of workflow execution. In: Meersman, R., et al. (eds.) OTM 2011. LNCS, vol. 7044, pp. 256–273. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25109-2_17

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This research has been partially supported by the UNIBZ projects REKAP and DACOMAN.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andrey Rivkin .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Calvanese, D., Montali, M., Patrizi, F., Rivkin, A. (2019). Modeling and In-Database Management of Relational, Data-Aware Processes. In: Giorgini, P., Weber, B. (eds) Advanced Information Systems Engineering. CAiSE 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11483. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21290-2_21

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21290-2_21

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21289-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-21290-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics