Understanding and Decomposing Control-Flow Loops in Business Process Models

Abstract

Business process models are usually described in a visual notation and reflect actual processes in systems. As a result, process models often are unstructured and cyclic. Unfortunately, unstructured and cyclic models are difficult to analyze and execute as research shows. Unstructuredness could be overcome using the existing studies, however, the analysis of cyclic models is still an open research problem. For this reason, this paper presents a decomposition of cyclic process models into sets of acyclic models. Together with a simple execution semantics for the acyclic models, the semantics of the decomposed model coincides with the original model if soundness is assumed. The decomposition can be achieved in a quadratic runtime complexity and gives the possibility to apply many existing analysis methodologies for acyclic process models. A short evaluation shows the feasibility of the approach.