Web-based modelling and collaborative simulation of declarative processes

Abstract

As a provider of Electronic Case Management solutions to knowledge-intensive businesses and organizations, the Danish company Exformatics has in recent years identified a need for flexible process support in the tools that we provide to our customers. We have addressed this need by adapting DCR Graphs, a formal declarative workflow notation developed at the IT University of Copenhagen. Through close collaboration with academia we first integrated execution support for the notation into our existing tools, by leveraging a cloud-based process engine implementing the DCR formalism. Over the last two years we have taken this adoption of DCR Graphs to the next level and decided to treat the notation as a product of its own by developing a stand-alone web-based collaborative portal for the modelling and simulation of declarative workflows. The purpose of the portal is to facilitate end-user discussions on how knowledge workers really work, by enabling collaborative simulation of processes. In earlier work we reported on the integration of DCR Graphs as a workflow execution formalism in the existing Exformatics ECM products. In this paper we report on the advances we have made over the last two years, we describe the new declarative process modelling portal, discuss its features, describe the process of its development, report on the findings of an initial evaluation of the usability of the tool, resulting from a tutorial on declarative modelling with DCR Graphs that we organized at last years BPM conference and present our plans for the future.