Getting Rid of the OR-Join in Business Process Models

Abstract— In practice, the development of process-aware information systems suffers from a gap between conceptual business process models and executable workflow specifications. Because of this gap, conceptual models are hardly reused as execution templates. In this paper, we address the notorious “OR-join problem” that is partly responsible for this gap. At the conceptual level people frequently use OR-joins. However, given their non-local semantics, OR-joins cannot be mapped easily onto executable languages. In particular, we present a new approach to map a conceptual process model with OR-joins (expressed in terms of an EPC) onto an executable model without OR-joins (expressed in terms of a Petri net). Although we used an EPC process model as a running example, the approach is equally applicable to other process modeling languages that offer OR-joins as (e.g. BPMN). Moreover, the resulting Petri net can be mapped onto other execution languages such as BPEL. All of this has b...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: EDOC
• Authors: Jan Mendling, Boudewijn F. van Dongen, Wil M. P. van der Aalst
• Keywords: Conceptual, Conceptual Business Process, EDOC 2007, Operating System, Process Model