Morten Marquard

A Case for Declarative Process Modelling: Agile Development of a Grant Application System

We report on a recent industrial project carried out by Exformatics A/S in which the company used the declarative DCR Graphs notation to model and implement the grant application process of a Danish foundation. We present the process and discuss the advantages of the approach and challenges faced both while modelling and implementing the process. Finally, we discuss current work on extensions to the DCR Graphs notation aiming to address the challenges raised by the case study and to support the declarative, agile approach.

Web-Based Modelling and Collaborative Simulation of Declarative Processes

As a provider of Electronic Case Management solutions to knowledge-intensive businesses and organizations, the Danish company Exformatics has in recent years identified a need for flexible process support in the tools that we provide to our customers. We have addressed this need by adapting DCR Graphs, a formal declarative workflow notation developed at the IT University of Copenhagen. Through close collaboration with academia we first integrated execution support for the notation into our existing tools, by leveraging a cloud-based process engine implementing the DCR formalism. Over the last two years we have taken this adoption of DCR Graphs to the next level and decided to treat the notation as a product of its own by developing a stand-alone web-based collaborative portal for the modelling and simulation of declarative workflows. The purpose of the portal is to facilitate end-user discussions on how knowledge workers really work, by enabling collaborative simulation of processes. In earlier work we reported on the integration of DCR Graphs as a workflow execution formalism in the existing Exformatics ECM products. In this paper we report on the advances we have made over the last two years, we describe the new declarative process modelling portal, discuss its features, describe the process of its development, report on the findings of an initial evaluation of the usability of the tool, resulting from a tutorial on declarative modelling with DCR Graphs that we organized at last years BPM conference and present our plans for the future.

Dynamic Condition Response Graphs for Trustworthy Adaptive Case Management

By trustworthy adaptive case management we mean that it should be possible to adapt processes and goals at runtime while guaranteeing that no deadlocks and livelocks are introduced. We propose to support this by applying a formal declarative process model, DCR Graphs, and exemplify its operational semantics that supports both run time changes and formal verification. We show how these techniques are being implemented in industry as a component of the Exformatics case management tools. Finally we discuss the planned future work, which will aim to allow changes to be tested for conformance wrt policies specified either as linear time logic (LTL) or DCR Graphs, extend the language with time and data and offer extended support for cross-organizational case management systems.

Hybrid Process Technologies in the Financial Sector: The Case of BRFkredit

(a) Situation faced: Exformatics, a Danish adaptive case-management vendor, wanted to leverage declarative process tools to support the flexible processes found at BRFkredit. However, switching from the more common flow-based notations to a declarative notation brought new challenges in terms of understandability. We undertook the project described in this chapter to investigate and address these challenges. (b) Action taken: We started our investigation by having several full-day and half-day meetings to discuss BRFkredit’s requirements. Based on these requirements, we proposed and developed a prototype hybrid process-modelling approach with which models are defined declaratively, but the possible behavior of the model can be viewed and investigated using flow-based notions. The prototype was then presented to BRFkredit for feedback. (c) Results achieved: Our investigation helped to clarify the requirements for making declarative process models understandable to end users at BRFkredit and showed how a hybrid approach could be used to satisfy these requirements. Based on these insights, we developed tools to enhance our existing declarative modelling framework with flow-based visualizations. (d) Lessons learned: Different stakeholders have different needs and preferred levels of abstraction when process models are used as tools for communication. However, one model that seems to fit most situations is a simple no-branches sequential swimlane diagram that was extracted automatically from a more detailed declarative model. These observations enabled Exformatics to enhance its declarative modelling framework to make it more attractive to end-users.