On the semantics of EPCs: resolving the vicious circle
Data & Knowledge Engineering - Special issue: Business process management
YAWL: yet another workflow language
Information Systems
Formalization and verification of EPCs with OR-joins based on state and context
CAiSE'07 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Advanced information systems engineering
Semantics of standard process models with OR-joins
OTM'07 Proceedings of the 2007 OTM Confederated international conference on On the move to meaningful internet systems: CoopIS, DOA, ODBASE, GADA, and IS - Volume Part I
Achieving a general, formal and decidable approach to the OR-Join in workflow using reset nets
ICATPN'05 Proceedings of the 26th international conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets
Formal semantics and implementation of BPMN 2.0 inclusive gateways
WS-FM'10 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Web services and formal methods
The difficulty of replacing an inclusive OR-join
BPM'12 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Business Process Management
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We propose a new semantics for the inclusive converging gateway (also known as Or-join). The new semantics coincides with the intuitive, widely agreed semantics for Or-joins on sound acyclic workflow graphs which is implied, for example, by dead path elimination on BPEL flows. The new semantics also coincides with the block-based semantics as used in BPEL on cyclic graphs that can be composed from sound acyclic graphs, repeat- and while-loops. Furthermore, we display several examples for unstructured workflow graphs for which Or-joins get the desired intuitive semantics. A key insight is that not all situations where two or more Or-joins seem to be mutually dependent (known as 'vicious circles') are necessarily symmetric. Many such situations are asymmetric and can be resolved naturally in favor of one of the Or-joins. Still symmetric or almost symmetric situations exist, for which it is not clear what semantics is desirable and which result in a deadlock in our semantics. We show that enabledness of an Or-join in our semantics can be decided in linear time in the size of the workflow graph.