BPM Spot
Articles
A short introduction to Business Process Management: Design & Analysis
Business process management, abbreviated as BPM, provides the surrounding and the toolbox required for the precise definition of business processes: A business process is a process that creates a value or result for a customer. The scope of BPM is quite wide, since it reaches from theoretical economists over practitioners up to computer scientists. Throughout this introduction, we stick to the following definition: Business process management refers to an integrated set of activities for designing, analyzing, deploying, enacting, managing, evaluating, and optimizing business processes. [Continue...]
A short introduction to the pi-calculus
This is a short introduction to the pi-calculus for readers unfamiliar with process algebra. It informally introduces the basic concepts of the pi-calculus and allows for getting a grasp of the formulas. The pi-calculus is based on the concepts of names and agents. A name is a collective term for things like links, pointers, references, identifiers and so on. These names could be used to synchronize actions between a community of concurrent agents. Each agent represents a process; a description of a timely and logical sequence of things to do. When one agent wants to talk to another agent they use a common name for communication. [Continue...]
The Workflow Patterns in Asynchronous Pi-Calculus
This article describes the representation of the Workflow Patterns in the asynchronous pi-calculus. The asynchronous pi-calculus only supports asynchronous communication. This kind of communication uses a "medium" for transfering information among agents. Since it is inherent to the medium that it cannot be observed if—or when—the information is delivered, nothing else than inaction is allowed to appear after a send prefix. To keep a straight implementation of the asynchronous idea, also unguarded output actions are disallowed in summations. If they would be allowed, all information contained in a summation had to be offered via the "medium", but some (the non-selected) had to be withdrawn afterwards. Since this is difficult (especially in real environments), it is left out. [Continue...]