Towards Analyzing Declarative Workflows

Enacting tasks in a workflow cannot always follow a predefined process model. In application domains like disaster management workflows are partially specified and circumstances of their enactment change. There exist various approaches for formal workflow models that are effective in such situations, like declarative specifications instead of operational models for formalizing flexible workflow process. These powerful models leave a gap to existing techniques in the domain of workflow modeling, workflow analysis, and workflow management. In this paper we bridge this gap with a compositional mechanism for translating declarative workflow models to operational workflow models. The mechanism is of a general nature and we reveal its principles as we provide an exemplary definition for translating DecSerFlow models based on LTL to Petri nets. We then demonstrate its use in analyzing and refining declarative models.