Refining Case Models Using Cardinality Constraints

Traditionally, business process management focuses on structured, imperative processes. With the increasing importance of knowledge work, semi-structured processes are entering center stage. Existing approaches to modeling knowledge-intensive processes use data objects but fail to sufficiently take into account data object cardinalities. Hence, they cannot guarantee that cardinality constraints are respected, nor use such constraints to handle concurrency and multiple activity instances during execution. This paper extends an existing case management approach with data object associations and cardinality constraints. The results facilitate a refined data access semantics, lower and upper bounds for process activities, and synchronized processing of multiple data objects. The execution semantics is formally specified by colored Petri nets. The effectiveness of the approach is shown by a compiler translating case models to colored Petri nets and by a dedicated process execution engine.