Advanced Temporal Control Structures for Business Process Modeling

Abstract

Modeling time-constrained business processes is required in many domains but often challenging due to the difficulty of incorporating declarative temporal requirements in procedural process definitions. Here, we propose advanced temporal control structures based on highly expressive temporal conditions to give designers explicit control over the temporal behavior of a business process abstracting from low-level management of time aspects. These structures facilitate controlling executions to meet temporal requirements. We propose an approach for checking the temporal correctness of business processes featuring these structures in terms of dynamic controllability. The approach is based on the reduction to basic control structures and a further mapping to the CSTNUD, an expressive family of temporal constraint networks with established checking procedures.