Towards automated support for case management processes with declarative configurable specifications

Abstract

Until recently, efficiency gained through process automation and control was the main preoccupation of BPM practitioners. As a result, the majority of mainstream process modeling standards today is characterized by the imperative modeling style. This style encourages a modeler to commit to a well-determined process execution scenario already at the early design stages. For case management processes, however, a strict commitment to a predefined control flow is considered by organizations as a serious handicap. This is the main reason why case management as well as other knowledge-intensive processes in the organizations mostly remain "pen and paper". In this article we demonstrate how configurable data objects and context-based configuration rules can be integrated into a process model in order to improve the process post-design adaptability and to pave the road for case management automated support. These concepts are defined as a part of DeCo (the Declarative Configurable process specification language). DeCo is a declarative modeling approach that is currently under development. We illustrate our results on the example. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.