An asynchronous rule-based approach for business process automation using obligations

The Edee architecture provides a mechanism for explicitly and uniformly capturing business occurrences, and provisions of contracts, policies, and law. Edee is able to reason about the interactions of intra-, inter-, and extra-organizational policy, and execute business procedures informed by the combined legal effects of these diverse rules. We show through an example how Edee's asynchronous approach, namely to initiate actions only after consulting the database to determine active obligations, differs from the traditional synchronous approach in which procedural side-effects are initiated when clauses of rules are evaluated. The example show-cases both conflict detection and resolution in Edee. Edee's novel mechanism for business process automation is based on assessment of legal status and directives, and can be contrasted to the conventional task-dependency and process-synchronization approach employed in other workflow systems.