Rule-based Behavioral Reasoning on Semantic Business Processes

Abstract

We propose a rule-based framework for representing and reasoning about business processes from both the procedural and ontological point of views. To this end we define a rule-based procedural semantics for a relevant fragment of BPMN, a very popular graphical notation for specifying business processes. Our semantics defines a state transition system by following an approach similar to the Fluent Calculus, and allows us to specify state change in terms of preconditions and effects of the enactment of activities. Then we show how the procedural process knowledge can be seamlessly integrated with the domain knowledge specified by using the OWL-RL rule-based ontology language. Our framework provides a wide range of reasoning services by using standard logic programming inference engines. In particular, we can perform very sophisticated reasoning tasks by combining both procedural and domain dependent knowledge. A preliminary implementation shows that our approach is effective in practice.