Declarative business process modelling: principles and modelling languages

TLDR

Business process literature offers many modelling approaches, with imperative and declarative paradigms representing extremes, and declarative modelling emphasizes directives, policies, and regulations that constrain how organisational goals can be achieved. This article investigates the underexplored declarative approach to process modelling. The authors outline declarative process modelling, describe its various approaches, and evaluate their underlying principles. They observe and assess key principles of declarative process modelling approaches, highlighting their strengths and limitations. Acknowledgements: the study was funded by KU Leuven Research Council grant OT/10/010.

Abstract

AbstractThe business process literature has proposed a multitude of business process modelling approaches or paradigms, each in response to a different business process type with a unique set of requirements. Two polar paradigms, i.e. the imperative and the declarative paradigm, appear to define the extreme positions on the paradigm spectrum. While imperative approaches focus on explicitly defining how an organisational goal should be reached, the declarative approaches focus on the directives, policies and regulations restricting the potential ways to achieve the organisational goal. In between, a variety of hybrid-paradigms can be distinguished, e.g. the advanced and adaptive case management.This article focuses on the less-exposed declarative approach on process modelling. An outline of the declarative process modelling and the modelling approaches is presented, followed by an overview of the observed declarative process modelling principles and an evaluation of the declarative process modelling approaches.Keywords: business process modellingbusiness processdeclarative process modellingprocess modelling languagesworkflow management AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank the KU Leuven Research Council for financial support under grant OT/10/010.