Process refinement validation and explanation with ontology reasoning

Abstract

In process engineering, processes can be refined from simple ones to more and more complex ones with decomposition and restructuring of activities. The validation of these refinements and the explanation of invalid refinements are non-trivial tasks. This paper formally defines process refinement validation based on the execution set semantics and presents a suite of refinement reduction techniques and an ontological representation of process refinement to enable reasoning for the validation and explanation of process refinement. Results show that it significantly improves efficiency, quality and productivity of process engineering. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.