Automatic generation of optimal business processes from business rules

Abstract

In recent years, business process models are increasingly being used as a means for business process improvement. Business rules can be seen as requirements for business processes, in that they describe the constraints that must hold for business processes that implement these business rules. Therefore, in principle one could devise (automated) transformations from business rules to business processes. These transformations should improve the quality (correctness) of business processes, by imposing their conformance to the applicable business rules, and should also allow business processes to be optimized for some additional requirements, like, for example, resource allocation, performance and costs. The objectives of this paper are twofold: to investigate the automated support to transform business rules into optimized processes, and to assess the suitability of model-driven technologies (metamodeling and transformations) and tools to implement these transformations. © 2010 IEEE.