A formal foundation for process modeling

  • Authors:
  • Christopher Menzel;Michael Grüninger

  • Affiliations:
  • Texas A&M University, College Station, TX;University of Maryland, College Park, MD

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the international conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems - Volume 2001
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Process modeling is ubiquitous in business and industry. While agreat deal of effort has been devoted to the formal andphilosophical investigation of processes, surprisingly littleresearch connects this work to real world process modeling. Thepurpose of this paper is to begin making such a connection. To doso, we first develop a simple mathematical model of activities andtheir instances based upon the model theory for the NIST ProcessSpecification Language (PSL), a simple language for describingthese entities, and a semantics for the latter in terms of theformer, and a set of axioms for the semantics based upon the NISTProcess Specification Language (PSL). On the basis of thisfoundation, we then develop a general notion of a process model,and an account of what it is for such a model to be realized by acollection of events.