Assisting Data Warehousing Populating Processes Design through Modelling using Coloured Petri Nets

Data warehousing systems populating processes are responsible for loading their data repositories – the data warehouses – with information they extract from operational sources. The tasks that integrate these processes are the most complex ones that we can find in a data warehousing system. For a flawless implementation, modelling these processes previously is important so that a correct set of requirements is considered. This paper approaches conceptual modelling and simulation of the populating processes of a DWS, by applying Coloured Petri Nets in the design of independent populating tasks. We adopt a change data capture task as the case study in order to demonstrate the effective application of coloured petri nets for modelling and simulating data warehousing populating processes.