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Transformation of Imperative Workflows to Declarative Business Rules

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Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 173))

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Abstract

Business rules and workflow models are both advocated as a means to specify the way of working in the business, so overlap between the two may be expected. Business rules lay down guidelines and restrictions about the way of working in an organization. Workflow models specify which activities should be conducted in what order, when a trigger arrives. Thus, the constructs of the workflow models encapsulate the rules of processing. In this paper, we show how the main procedural constructs of imperative workflows can be transformed to declarative business rules. The transformation results in two rules that reflect the procedural nature of workflow. These capture the business requirements of work processing on a more abstract level with less emphasis on implementational detail than the corresponding workflow model. By transforming the workflows to declarative rules, the rules of the business become available for analysis, allowing the organization to extend their ruleset or to prune it for redundant rules.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Open University The Netherlands, Valkenburgerweg 177, Heerlen, Netherlands

    Lex Wedemeijer

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  1. Lex Wedemeijer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Interdisciplinary Institute for Collaboration and Research on Enterprise Systems and Technology – IICREST, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Boris Shishkov

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Wedemeijer, L. (2014). Transformation of Imperative Workflows to Declarative Business Rules. In: Shishkov, B. (eds) Business Modeling and Software Design. BMSD 2013. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 173. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06671-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06671-4_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-06670-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-06671-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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