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On Defining the Behavior of OR-joins in Business Process Models

2009; Verlag der Technischen Universität Graz; Volume: 15; Linguagem: Inglês

0948-695X

Egon Börger, Ove Sörensen, Bernhard Thalheim,

Petri Nets in System Modeling

The recent literature on business process modeling notations contains numerous contributions to the so-called OR-join (or inclusive merge gateway) problem. We analyze the problem and present an approach to solve it without compromising any of the two major concerns that are involved: a) a clear semantical definition (design), which also clarifies what has to be implemented to achieve the intended generality of the construct, and b) a comprehensive set of static and dynamic analysis methods (verification of properties of business process models using the construct). We provide a conceptually simple scheme for dynamic OR-join synchronization policies, which can be implemented with low run-time overhead and allows the practitioner to effectively link the design of business process models with OR-joins to an analysis of the intended model properties. The definitions have been experimentally validated by a graph-based simulator.(2)