A Visual Editor for the Declare Process Modelling Language
Name
Timothy Iyanuoluwa Fadayini
Abstract
Business process modelling represents information flow, business activities, and decision logic in business processes. Process models can be divided into at least two types, procedural and declarative process models. Procedural models aim to describe end-to-end processes and only allow for activities explicitly triggered through control flow. However, this can quickly become cumbersome if the process is loosely-structured or includes many varieties. For example, a hospital process can quickly become unreadable because of the various paths representing the large variety of possible clinical pathways to be specified in the model. Cases like this are where the declarative modelling approach could be a better choice. Declarative modelling allows modellers to capture constraints on the allowed activity flows, so if flows do not violate the specified constraints, they are allowed. There are multiple applications available for working with process models. For example, Disco and Apromore are for procedural models, and RuM is for declarative models. This thesis work focuses on RuM. More specifically, it builds on the Master's Thesis of A. Alman, 'A Desktop Application for Advanced Business Rule Mining', to further improve RuM by developing a new visual process model editor for the Declare process modelling language. This new editor is developed from the ground up, with the aim of replacing the current, mainly table-based, editor with a more appealing, easy-to-use, and fluid model editor where the user can work with the graphical representation of the Declare model directly, thus resolving one of the more difficult future works outlined in the thesis of A. Alman. A user evaluation with experts was conducted to evaluate the final resulting editor, and the main findings of this evaluation are presented as a part of the thesis.
Graduation Thesis language
English
Graduation Thesis type
Master - Software Engineering
Supervisor(s)
Anti Alman, Fabrizio Maria Maggi
Defence year
2023