Maintaining execution histories for understanding the execution of business processes

As database and workflow technologies are used to manage business processes, decision-makers of enterprises must query the execution of business processes to understand and refine these processes for expected throughput and quality. Introducing the representation of business processes in the database schema allows the execution histories of business processes to be maintained in the database for supporting queries on how business processes are executed. In this work, we incorporate finite state machines into the entity-relationship (ER) model for representing business processes in the database schema. Analytical systems can be developed in the proposed representation to assist decision-makers in observing the business processes.