Discovering Business Rules from Business Process Models
📝 Abstract
Discovering business rules from business process models are of advantage to ensure the compliance of business processes with business rules. Furthermore it provides the agility of business processes in case of business rules evolution. Current approaches are limited on types of rules that can be discovered. This paper analyses the expression power of some popular business process modelling languages in embedding business rules in its presentation and provides indicators to extract various types of business rules from business process models.
💡 Analysis
Discovering business rules from business process models are of advantage to ensure the compliance of business processes with business rules. Furthermore it provides the agility of business processes in case of business rules evolution. Current approaches are limited on types of rules that can be discovered. This paper analyses the expression power of some popular business process modelling languages in embedding business rules in its presentation and provides indicators to extract various types of business rules from business process models.
📄 Content
1 Discovering Business Rules from Business Process Models
Thanh Thoa Pham Thi, Markus Helfert, Fakir Hossain, Thang Le Dinh
Abstract: Discovering business rules from business process models are of advantage to ensure the compliance of business processes with business rules. Furthermore it provides the agility of business processes in case of business rules evolution. Current approaches are limited on types of rules that can be discovered. This paper analyses the expression power of some popular business process modelling languages in embedding business rules in its presentation and provides indicators to extract various types of business rules from business process models. Key words: Business Process Models, Business Rules, Petri Nets, EPC
INTRODUCTION
Business processes can be considered as the centre of the business of an organisation.
They are related to different aspects of a business such as business structure, business
activities, events, organizational units and interactions between those aspects to achieve
goals defined by the organisation [6].
Business rules (BR) are the integral part of the business which represents business
policies, internal regulations, external regulations, procedures or standards set up by the
professional corps which the organization must comply with. A BR is “a statement that
defines or constrains some aspects of a business” (Business Rules Group). Alternatively BR
is “a proposition about business things, relationships between them and operations applied
to them, from the business enterprise viewpoint” [2]. In other words, BRs control the
business; consequently, BP depends directly on BR [11].
Business requirement analysis for information system development demands to
capture different aspects of business by means of modelling languages. Actually it is
convinced that there is still a lack of documentations on BR, and if BRs are not acquired
systematically and completely, they cannot reflect real condition of business environment.
Consequently, developed applications may not meet business requirements [3]. This issue
clearly relates to the incompliance of BP models which results from business requirement
analysis with BR.
Let’s take an example of an online hotel booking service provided by a travel agency
to illustrate the relation of business rules and business processes: “The agency collaborates
with many hotels and provides the hotel booking service to clients. A client makes a hotel
booking through the agency website and some other services provided by hotels. The client
must provide his credit card information to the agency (via its website) when he books. Once
the client confirms the booking, the agency automatically sends a confirmation email to the
client as well as to the corresponding hotel. The cancellation policies may be not the same
for every hotel, but in general it is stated that cancellations before 24 hours (or 48 hours) to
check-in date and time (i.e. earliest check-in time) are free of charge; otherwise the first
night’s fee will be charged. Once the booking is cancelled, an email needs to be sent to the
client and another one needs to be sent to the hotel to confirm the cancellation”.
The BP model of this service must describe the action Charge the first night fee
following a late cancellation event. This business logic is an implementation of the
business rule: On receiving the cancellation request If clients make the late cancellation Then
their first night fee is charged.
2
Current approaches for discovering business rules from business processes are limited on type of rules that can be discovered. At the same time, a second stream of research aims to integrate business rules into business process [13][15]. In [14], Morgan explains general indicators to find business rules in business environment, for example business rules can find in “features defined by external agencies”, “automated business decision making”, “systematic variations among organizational units”, “entities with multiple states”, “derivations, or calculations”, etc. However, there is not a systematic guidance to discover business rules. In this paper, we propose some indicators for discovering BR from BP by analyzing how and which BR are incorporated in BP. It makes two important contributions:
Firstly, it allows to verify the compliance of BP with BR at the conceptual level,
Secondly, it allows to coordinate BP and BR effectively in case of evolving BR and/or BP. The remainder of the paper is organized as follow: in the next section, we resume basic concepts of business rules and business process models. Later we discuss some related work on discovering business rules and some work on integrating business rules into business processes. Following that section is the presentation of indicators to extract business rules with illustration of the online hotel booking example. Next
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