Generation of optimal business processesfrom business rules

Business process modeling is increasingly used as a method for business process improvement, either as a means to analyze or automate the business process. Business process modeling uses business process modeling languages to define the business process. There are however several problems when using these languages, mainly that they are not understandable for business people and that they are procedural languages, which means that they specify how business processes should be executed and in what order, making the business process inflexible if implemented in a workflow management system. Inspired by these problems declarative languages where developed. Declarative languages specify what is, must, ought and can be done, without prescribing how it should be done. In the context of business processes business rule languages are declarative languages. Using business rule languages for specifying business processes could solve some of the problems mentioned above. However, in order to automate the specified business process with a workflow management system, some part of the how, namely the order of activities, is still needed. The business rule specification thus needs to be transformed to an business process model and this has to be done automatically and systematically so that the business rule specification is always interpreted the same way. This thesis presents a method to automatically transform business rules, written in the PA-notation, to business processes, modeled in BPMN. The approach taken to perform the transformation is to derive the dependencies between activities from the business rules, use the dependencies to determine the optimal sequence of activities and optimal allocation of resources, and build a business process model based on that. The method has been implemented in a prototype and verified using a case study. Given that the business rule specification is complete and consistent, our method is capable of automatically transforming business rules to optimal business processes.