FLEXIBLE INTEGRATION OF PETRI NET BASED PROCESS DESCRIPTION WITH USER-SPECIFIC DATA DESCRIPTIONS

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Gruhn, Volker | Lembke, Sabine

Affiliations: University Dortmund, Germany, [email protected] | Technical University Berlin, Germany, [email protected]

Abstract: Petri nets are a powerful formalism to describe processes, including the parallelism of activities with these processes. This experience is underpinned by various approaches to software pro-cess modelling and business process engineering. These kinds of processes focus on the creation and/or manipulation of certain types of information. In order to describe these underlying types, data modelling techniques are used. These vary from entity-relationship modelling to different kinds of object-oriented modelling techniques. The integration of processual aspects, data as-pects and organizational aspects results in models of software processes and business processes which are expressive, which can be analyzed thoroughly and which, finally, can be used for enactment purposes, i.e. they can be used for driving real processes forward. The process modelling experience of the last decade shows that different users prefer different techniques for expressing the data aspects and the organizational aspects of process models. That is where the PARFUN approach comes into play. The objective of the PARFUN approach is to describe the processual aspects using Petri nets and to allow an easy plugging in of several kinds of data and organizational models.

Keywords: data model, petri net, lean interface

Journal: Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 45-66, 2001