Translating novelty of business model into terms of modal logics

Abstract

By employing some modalities as bases for modeling business processes, the present paper shows that a conventional way of analyzing Petri nets also turns out to be a method for specifying the novelty of business processes. This novelty is translated into terms of modal logics. Most conventional methods for modeling business processes represent “structures” of their processes, which do not show directly their “novelty.” The proposed method, on the other hand, enables us to specify their novelty. From the viewpoint of alethic, deontic and temporal modalities, business processes are modeled by interactions among three layers, i.e., top, main and base layers. The possible actions and states represented by using Petri nets in the main layer are controlled by designers’ intentions represented in the top layer, and by what we call social causalities represented in the base layer. It is well known that a conventional method for checking the reachabilities of Petri nets results in a coverability tree of the net. We show that the coverability tree of the net in the main layer can be interpreted as a transition tree of possible worlds in terms of the modal logic, and that the type of tree specifies some kind of novelty of a business process.