Enriched modeling and reasoning on business processes with ontologies and answer set programming

Abstract

Domain ontologies may provide the proper level of abstraction in modeling semantic constraints and business rules in BPM; in fact, ontologies are intended to define terminologies to be shared within and across organizations and reused in different applications. In this paper we show how Answer Set Programming (ASP), a powerful framework for declarative problem solving, can accommodate for domain ontologies in modeling and reasoning about Business Processes, especially for process verification. Description Logics (DLs) provide the formal counterpart of ontologies, and in our approach knowledge on the process domain is expressed in a low-complexity DL. Terms from the ontology can be used in embedding business rules in the model as well as in expressing constraints that should be verified to achieve compliance by design. Causal rules for reasoning on side-effects of activities in the process domain can be derived, based on knowledge expressed in the DL. We show how ASP can accommodate them, relying on a reasoning about actions and change approach, for process analysis, and, in particular, for verifying formulas in temporal logic.