A structural/temporal query language for Business Processes

Daniel Deutch*, Tova Milo

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

A Business Process consists of multiple business activities, which, when combined in a flow, achieve some particular goal. These processes usually operate in a distributed environment and the software implementing them is fairly complex. Thus, effective tools for analysis of the possible executions of such processes are extremely important for companies (Beeri et al., 2006, 2007 [4,5]); (Deutch and Milo, 2008 [13]); these tools can allow to debug and optimize the processes, and to make an optimal use of them. The goal of the present paper is to consider a formal model underlying Business Processes and study query languages over such processes. We study in details the relationship of the proposed model with previously suggested formalisms for processes modeling and querying. In particular we propose a query evaluation algorithm of polynomial data complexity that can be applied uniformly to two kind of common queries over processes, namely queries on the structure of the process specification as well as temporal queries on the potential behavior of the defined process. We show that unless P=NP the efficiency of our algorithm is asymptotically optimal.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)583-609
Number of pages27
JournalJournal of Computer and System Sciences
Volume78
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2012

Funding

FundersFunder number
European Commission
Israel Science Foundation

    Keywords

    • Business Processes
    • Query languages

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