lightEPC: A Formal Approach for Modeling Personalized Lightweight Event-Driven Business Process

Abstract

A considerable number of business process modeling approaches are developed for end-users in recent years. The core issue of end-user oriented business process modeling is how to fill the gap between end-user friendly business process model and professional IT process model. In our previous work, a wizard based lightweight event-driven modeling method is designed for end-users to create their own personalized process. We observe that such a process created by end-users often cause execution time errors, which cannot be effectively detected by existing modeling languages. In this paper, we propose a formal model based on extended event-driven process chain (eEPC), which is named lightweight event-driven process chain (lightEPC). We give complete formalization of lightEPC and present two error patterns and corresponding detection algorithms to perform design-time model checking based on this model. These approaches effectively help end-users to create correct business process satisfying their personalized requirements.