A Flexible Event Handling Model for Business Process Enactment

Business process management (BPM) enables modeling, executing and monitoring organizational processes to achieve certain business goals. Organizations continue to strive for agility and take advantage of the digital era to bring flexibility in their processes, for example by integrating complex event processing (CEP) techniques. Event handling specifies how a process interacts with its environment and how the environmental occurrences influence the execution of the process. Though highly expressive and feature-rich languages like BPMN exist for process specification, they still lack the flexibility required for event handling in different real-life scenarios. In this work, an event handling model is proposed that take into account the possibilities of event subscription at different points in time with respect to process execution. The model is grounded formally and provides mapping to Petri Nets as implementation semantics. Further, trace analysis ensures correct execution of process behavior while maintaining the temporal dependencies intact among event subscription, event occurrence, event consumption and event unsubscription.