Towards Analyzing Declarative Workflows

Abstract

Enacting tasks in a workflow cannot always follow a pre-defined
process model. In application domains like disaster management
workflows are partially specified and circumstances of their
enactment change. There exist various approaches for formal workflow
models that are effective in such situations, like declarative
specifications instead of operational models for formalizing
flexible workflow process. These powerful models leave a gap to
existing techniques in the domain of workflow modeling, workflow
analysis, and workflow management.

In this paper we bridge this gap with a compositional mechanism for
translating declarative workflow models to operational workflow
models. The mechanism is of a general nature and we reveal its
principles as we provide an exemplary definition for translating
DecSerFlow models based on LTL to Petri nets. We then demonstrate
its use in analyzing and refining declarative models.