Translating BPMN to business rules

Abstract

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a standard graphical notation that is widely used for modeling Business Processes (BP) in Business Process Management (BPM) systems. A key application of such systems is continuous analysis of BP execution for checking compliance of execution logs with process models. In this paper we introduce a simple, human-readable rule language based on a fragment of First-Order Logic (FOL) and show how compliance rules can be generated directly from BPMN models. We focus on control flow aspects of BPMN models by (1) transforming the model to obtain a uniform representation of task activation (2) dividing the model into sets of components and (3) using our proposed language to generate compliance rules for each component. We show that these rules can be used in the analysis of the business process execution log using British Telecom’s Aperture business process analysis tool.