A Logic-Based Methodology for Business Process Analysis and Design: Linking Business Policies to Workflow Models

Abstract

Today, organizations often need to modify their business processes to cope with changes in the environment, such as mergers/acquisitions, new government regulations, and new customer demand. Most organizations also have a set of business policies defining the way they conduct their business. Although there has been extensive research on process analysis and design, how to systematically extract workflow models from business policies has not been studied, resulting in a missing link between the specification of business policies and the modeling of business processes.Given that process changes are often determined by executives and managers at the policy level, the aforementioned missing link often leads to inefficient and inaccurate implementation of process changes by business analysts and process designers. We refer to this problem as the policy mismatch problem in business process management. For organizations with large-scale business processes and a large number of business policies, solving the policy mismatch problem is very difficult and challenging.In this dissertation, we attempt to provide a formal link between business policies and workflow models by proposing a logic-based methodology for process analysis and design. In particular, we first propose a Policy-driven Process Design (PPD) methodology to formalize the procedure of extracting workflow models from business policies. In PPD, narrative process policies are parsed into precise information on various workflow components, and a set of process design rules and algorithms are applied to generate workflow models from that information.We also develop a logic-based process modeling language named Unified Predicate Language (UPL). UPL is able to represent all workflow components in a single logic format and provides analytical capability via logic inference and query. We demonstrate UPL's expressive power and analytical ability by applying it to process design and process change analysis. In particular, we use UPL to define and classify process change anomalies and develop algorithms to verify and enforce process consistency.The Policy-driven Process Design, Unified Predicate Language, and process change analysis approach found in this dissertation contribute to business process management research by providing a formal methodology for resolving the policy mismatch problem.