From instance spanning models to instance spanning rules

Abstract

Instance Spanning Constraints (ISCs) allow to control the behavior of multiple business processes and their instances which is crucial in many application domains (e.g., for process synchronization). The modeling and visualization of ISCs hence constitutes an essential brick in process compliance management. Currently, no approach exists for representing a set of Instance Spanning Rules (ISRs) based on an ISC. Existing work rather focuses on visualizing ISCs at the more abstract Instance Spanning Model (ISM) level. However, the gap between the ISM and the ISR level must be bridged in order to enable the enactment of an ISC at process level. Hence, this paper collects requirements for the implementation of ISRs through an ISM, e.g., by specification of data elements. Based on the requirements an existing visual modeling language is tailored towards the modeling of ISRs and the corresponding XML specifications are provided. Both, visual modeling and XML representation are prototypically implemented and illustrated by means of a set of use cases. Finally, an algorithm for deriving the common ISM of a set of ISRs is introduced and evaluated based on a given test set.