Process
modeling languages and rules modeling languages are both used to document
organizational policies and procedures. While process modeling languages
typically describe a procedural sequence of activities, including decisions and
concurrency, rules modeling languages often rely on a declarative description
of conditions, and constraints that need to be followed. Understanding the
relationship between the two languages types would allow organizations to
maximize synergies, avoid content duplication, and thus reduce their overall modeling
effort. Rules modeling languages has received less attention than process
modeling languages. This paper is to investigate the capabilities of four rule
modeling languages, namely: Simple Rule Markup Language (SRML), Semantic Web
Rules Language (SWRL), Production Rule Representation (PRR), and Semantics of
Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR). The paper looks into the
representational capabilities of these languages, and if these capabilities are
complementary or substitutive to those of process modeling languages. The paper
also looked into integration with respect to four process modeling languages: Colored
Petri nets (CPN), Event-driven Process Chains (EPC), Integrated DEFinition
methodology (IDEF), and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN).
Business
rules can be categorized into 5 different types: Integrity rules (the
acceptable relationship between elements), Derivation rules (used to infer new
facts based on known facts), Reaction rules (alternative action rules),
Production rules (condition, action rules), and Transformation rules (restrict
the state of changes). Process modeling languages can be: Activity centric,
Process object centric, and Resource centric. Process languages appear as “graph-based
languages (e.g. BPMN, EPC), net-based languages (e.g. Petri nets, flow nets),
and workflow programming languages (e.g. Business Process Execution Language
(BPEL))”. Work on integration of these two types of languages appeared after
introducing rule modeling concept, but no theory-based evaluation of the
usefulness of these combinations has been conducted so far. There is a need to
augment existing research on the representational capabilities of process
modeling languages with matching evaluations on the rule modeling side.
Furthermore, there is a need to provide practitioners with guidance as to which
rule modeling language and which combination of rule and process modeling
languages will allow them to capture the most real-world details using language
primitives.
The authors
used Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) ontology to develop criteria construct. Based on
these criteria the study showed that in general SRML would satisfy more
constructs than other rule modeling language. Moreover, in combination with a process
modeling language it was shown that the combination of SRML and BPMN would
provide the best representation capability, thus the best combination of the
eight examined languages. The
study then went a step further considering combining rule modeling language
with rule specification beside the process modeling language. The paper
considered two combinations SBVR with PRR and SBVR with SWRL, then compared
these two combination in respect to all four process modeling languages. The
study shows that Even thought the pare SBVR with PRR is a strong combination
with BPMN than any other pare, but it is still better to use SRML with BPMN as
it has better representation capabilities.
Zur Muehlen
and Indulska in this paper compared between four ‘rule modeling languages’
(SRML, SWRL, PRR, and SBVR) in respect to integration with four different
process modeling languages (CPN, EPC, IDEF, and BPMN) based on representation
capabilities criteria. The study showed that the best combination is to have SRML
as the rule language and combine it with BPMN as a process modeling language;
this combination satisfies more representation capabilities than any other
combination. The study was limited to only four rule languages and four process
modeling languages (non of which is an automation language). And the study was
also limited to comparing in regard to representation capabilities. So based on
this study, if representation capability was the important aspect one is looking
for, and the choice was between these four rule languages and these four
process modeling languages, one showed chose SRML and BPMN.
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