Behavioral Reasoning on Semantic Business Processes in a Rule-Based Framework

We propose a representation method for semantically enriched business processes by combining in a uniform logical framework both the procedural and the domain dependent knowledge. First, we define a rule-based procedural semantics for a relevant fragment of BPMN, a very popular graphical notation for specifying business processes. Our semantics defines a state transition system by following an approach similar to the Fluent Calculus, and allows us to specify state change in terms of preconditions and effects of the enactment of activities. Then, we show how the procedural process knowledge can be seamlessly integrated with the domain knowledge specified by using the OWL-RL rule-based ontology language. As a result, our framework provides a wide range of reasoning services by using standard logic programming inference engines.