BEST: A Unified Business Process Enactment via Streams and Tables for Service Computing

TL;DR

This paper introduces BEST, a unified framework for business process enactment that leverages streams and tables with CQL to enable dynamic, cross-paradigm service orchestration and execution.

Contribution

It proposes a novel execution semantics based on CQL that unifies procedural and declarative process models for seamless service orchestration.

Findings

CQL-based semantics enable dynamic process execution.

Industrial models like BPMN and DCR are enacted through CQL.

Unified event model supports cross-paradigm process orchestration.

Abstract

Business process models are essential for the representation, analysis, and execution of organizational processes, serving as orchestration blueprints while relying on (web) services to implement individual tasks. At the representation level, there are two dominant paradigms: procedural (imperative) notations that specify the sequential flows within a process and declarative notations that capture the process as a set of constraints. Although each notation offers distinct advantages in representational clarity and cognitive effectiveness, they are seldom integrated, leading to compatibility challenges. In this paper, we set aside the imperative-declarative dichotomy to focus on orchestrating services that execute the underlying tasks. We propose an execution semantics based on the Continuous Query Language (CQL), where CQL statements respond dynamically to streams of events. As events unfold, these CQL statements update the execution state (tables) and can generate new events, effectively triggering (web) services that implement specific process tasks. By defining all executions around a unified event model, we achieve cross-language and cross-paradigm process enactment. We showcase how industrial process modeling languages, such as BPMN and DCR graphs, can be enacted through CQL queries, allowing seamless orchestration and execution of services across diverse modeling paradigms.