Event grammars: a modeling representation for business procedures

Abstract

An alternative representation for modeling organizational procedures is proposed, called event grammars, which is based on the definite-clause grammar formalism used for natural-language parsing. A graphical counterpart, called event nets, is also introduced. In effect, a history of events is recognized as conforming to a particular procedure, analogous to the way in which a list of words is recognized by a particular grammar. Event grammars are intermediate to state transition networks and Petri nets in that they capture contingencies between events but only a limited amount of concurrency. However, considerable compactness of representation is achieved.<>