Social specifications of business processes with Azzurra

Fabiano Dalpiaz, Evellin Cardoso, Giulia Canobbio, Paolo Giorgini, John Mylopoulos
2015 2015 IEEE 9th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS)  
A business process is above all else a social interaction among multiple participants. Business process modeling languages support the description of business processes in operational terms as collections of interleaved activities conducted by human and software agents. However, such descriptions do not capture adequately the richness of social interaction among participants. To address this deficiency, we propose Azzurra, a specification language for modeling and executing business processes.
more » ... zzurra is founded on social concepts, such as roles, agents and commitments among them, and Azzurra specifications are social models consisting of sets of commitments. As such, Azzurra specifications support flexible executions of business processes, and provide a semantic notion of actor accountability and business process compliance. In this paper, we present syntax and semantics of Azzurra, and we propose algorithms to determine runtime compliance with an Azzurra social specification. We review the literature in cooperative work, business process modeling, commitment protocols, choreographies and service-orientation, business artifacts, and compliance with obligations. Due to space limitations, we discuss few examples per category. Cooperative work. Commitments are a main abstraction in the influential Coordinator [8] system for tracking activities in an organization. This work inspires our approach. However, as observed by Singh [17], the Coordinator takes a procedural approach to model conversations, which is less flexible than commitment protocols.
doi:10.1109/rcis.2015.7128859 dblp:conf/rcis/DalpiazCCGM15 fatcat:5qvhs6whejd53pgkctq2uqoqey