CombiS-BP Editor: Combining Declarative and Imperative Languages in BP Modelling

Abstract

Business Process models allow business experts to describe the activities that must be performed to achieve a defined goal. Several imperative standard languages have been created to describe both control-flow and data-flow perspectives. Unfortunately, the imperative specification may be very difficult, complex and even inefficient to any kind of models, particularly, when these models depend on input data of each specific process instance. On the other hand, although business experts are able to define a declarative specification, they may be unaware of trans lating it into an imperative process model by using the existing standard languages. As a solution, we present CombiS-BP Editor, a tool that enables combined modelling of the two aforementioned specifications: (i) allows an imperative specification when experts know the execution order of the activities in the model and; (ii) enables a declarative specification when the experts know what has to be done instead of how it has to be done.