TY - JOUR
T1 - A structural/temporal query language for Business Processes
AU - Deutch, Daniel
AU - Milo, Tova
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was partially supported by the EU project Mancoosi and the Israel Science Foundation.
PY - 2012/3
Y1 - 2012/3
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Business Processes
KW - Query languages
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84856006510&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jcss.2011.09.004
DO - 10.1016/j.jcss.2011.09.004
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AN - SCOPUS:84856006510
SN - 0022-0000
VL - 78
SP - 583
EP - 609
JO - Journal of Computer and System Sciences
JF - Journal of Computer and System Sciences
IS - 2
ER -