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International Conference on Business Process Management

BPM 2018: Business Process Management Forum pp 71–88Cite as

Enriched Modeling and Reasoning on Business Processes with Ontologies and Answer Set Programming

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 329))

Abstract

Domain ontologies may provide the proper level of abstraction in modeling semantic constraints and business rules in BPM; in fact, ontologies are intended to define terminologies to be shared within and across organizations and reused in different applications. In this paper we show how Answer Set Programming (ASP), a powerful framework for declarative problem solving, can accommodate for domain ontologies in modeling and reasoning about Business Processes, especially for process verification. Description Logics (DLs) provide the formal counterpart of ontologies, and in our approach knowledge on the process domain is expressed in a low-complexity DL. Terms from the ontology can be used in embedding business rules in the model as well as in expressing constraints that should be verified to achieve compliance by design. Causal rules for reasoning on side-effects of activities in the process domain can be derived, based on knowledge expressed in the DL. We show how ASP can accommodate them, relying on a reasoning about actions and change approach, for process analysis, and, in particular, for verifying formulas in temporal logic.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As a consequence of the introduction of the causal laws for the axioms in \(\mathcal T\), there is no need to exploit a DL reasoner, as each state is guaranteed to satisfy \(\mathcal T\).

  2. 2.

    It could be modeled separately in a decision model, an issue we do not address in this paper.

  3. 3.

    The work in [22] allows for conditions on numerical data – e.g., the piece number in an order is larger than 50000 – to be used in the model and in the formulae to be verified. In order to deal with them, without considering all individual values in the – finite but large – numerical domain, it relies on Constraint ASP [19]. In this paper we do not consider this feature, which can however be integrated with the ones addressed here, and would provide another form of abstraction, complementary to the use of ontologies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DISIT, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Alessandria, Italy

    Laura Giordano & Daniele Theseider Dupré

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  1. Laura Giordano
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  2. Daniele Theseider Dupré
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Correspondence to Daniele Theseider Dupré .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hasso-Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Mathias Weske

  2. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Marco Montali

  3. Data61, CSIRO, Eveleigh, New South Wales, Australia

    Ingo Weber

  4. University of Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

    Jan vom Brocke

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Giordano, L., Theseider Dupré, D. (2018). Enriched Modeling and Reasoning on Business Processes with Ontologies and Answer Set Programming. In: Weske, M., Montali, M., Weber, I., vom Brocke, J. (eds) Business Process Management Forum. BPM 2018. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 329. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98651-7_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98651-7_5

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