Abstract
A business process is a combination of structured and related activities that aim at fulfilling a specific organizational goal for a customer or market. An important measure when developing a business process is the degree of parallelism, namely, the maximum number of tasks that are executable in parallel at any given time in a process. This measure determines the peak demand on tasks and thus can provide valuable insight on the problem of resource allocation in business processes. This paper considers timed business processes modeled in BPMN, a workflow-based graphical notation for processes, where execution times can be associated to several BPMN constructs such as tasks and flows. An encoding of timed business processes into Maude’s rewriting logic system is presented, enabling the automatic computation of timed degrees of parallelism for business processes. The approach is illustrated with a simple yet realistic case study in which the degree of parallelism is used to improve the business process design with the ultimate goal of optimizing resources and, therefore, with the potential for reducing operating costs.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. F. Durán has been partially supported by Spanish MINECO/FEDER project TIN2014-52034-R. The work of C. Rocha was partially supported by CAPES, Colciencias, and Inria via the STIC AmSud project “EPIC: EPistemic Interactive Concurrency” (Proc. No 88881.117603/2016-01), and by Capital Semilla 2017, project “SCORES: Stochastic Concurrency in Rewrite-based Probabilistic Models” (Proj. No. 020100610).
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Durán, F., Rocha, C., Salaün, G. (2018). Computing the Parallelism Degree of Timed BPMN Processes. In: Mazzara, M., Ober, I., Salaün, G. (eds) Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations. STAF 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11176. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04771-9_24
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