Business processes. A database perspective. (Q2902055)

The book presents a formal approach to specifiy and query business processes. Taking inspiration from the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standard and the theory of data bases, a method is described to formally model recursively nested business processes with an acyclic control flow as single entry single exit recursive state machines. Furthermore, a query language is devised that builds on predefined execution patterns and that can be evaluated in PTIME or EXPTIME over a set of given business process models. Different subclasses of query patterns are presented and the corresponding query algorithms and their complexity are discussed in detail. The query patterns fall into three generic classes: selection queries that select all matching business process flows, projection queries that only retrieve parts (sub-flows) of the matching process flows, and boolean queries that ask for the existence of certain process (sub-) flows. The book concludes with a brief discussion of applying the theory to the problems of process mining and process monitoring.