An asynchronous rule-based approach for business process automation using obligations

ABSTRACT

The Edee architecture provides a mechanism for explicitly and uniformly capturing business occurrences, and provisions of contracts, policies, and law. Edee is able to reason about the interactions of intra-, inter-, and extra-organizational policy, and execute business procedures informed by the combined legal effects of these diverse rules. We show through an example how Edee's asynchronous approach, namely to initiate actions only after consulting the database to determine active obligations, differs from the traditional synchronous approach in which procedural side-effects are initiated when clauses of rules are evaluated. The example show-cases both conflict detection and resolution in Edee. Edee's novel mechanism for business process automation is based on assessment of legal status and directives, and can be contrasted to the conventional task-dependency and process-synchronization approach employed in other workflow systems.

REFERENCES

• 1: A. Abrahams and J. Bacon. The life and times of identified, situated, and conflicting norms. In Sixth International Workshop on Deontic Logic in Computer Science (DEON'02), Imperial College, London, UK, May 2002.
• 2: A. Abrahams and J. Bacon. A software implementation of Kimbrough's disquotation theory for representing and enforcing electronic commerce contracts. Group Decision and Negotiations Journal, Forthcoming.
• 3: J. Austin. How to do things with words. Oxford University Press, second edition, 1976.
• 4: William F. Clocksin , C. S. Mellish, Programming in PROLOG, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 1994
• 5: Christine Collet , Thierry Coupaye , T. Svensen, NAOS - Efficient and Modular Reactive Capabilities in an Object-Oriented Database System, Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, p.132-143, September 12-15, 1994
• 6: Gianpaolo Cugola , Elisabetta Di Nitto , Alfonso Fuggetta, The JEDI Event-Based Infrastructure and Its Application to the Development of the OPSS WFMS, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.27 n.9, p.827-850, September 2001 [doi>10.1109/32.950318]
• 7: A. Daskalopulu, T. Dimtrakos, and T. Maibaum. E-contract fulfillment and agents' attitudes. In Proceedings ERCIM WG E-Commerce Workshop on the Role of Trust in E-Business, Zurich, October 2001.
• 8: T. Davis. Lexical Semantics and Linking in the Hierarchical Lexicon. PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1996.
• 9: C. Forgy. Rete: A fast algorithm for the many patterns/many objects match problem. Artificial Intelligence, 19(1):17-37, 1982.
• 10: E. Friedman-Hill. Jess, the expert system shell for the Java platform. http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov/jess/, August 2001.
• 11: Peter Green , Michael Rosemann, Integrated process modeling: an ontological evaluation, Information Systems, v.25 n.2, p.73-87, April 2000 [doi>10.1016/S0306-4379(00)00010-7]
• 12: Benjamin N. Grosof , Yannis Labrou , Hoi Y. Chan, A declarative approach to business rules in contracts: courteous logic programs in XML, Proceedings of the 1st ACM conference on Electronic commerce, p.68-77, November 03-05, 1999, Denver, Colorado, United States [doi>10.1145/336992.337010]
• 13: E. Hanson, S. Bodagala, and U. Chadaga. Optimized trigger condition testing in Ariel using Gator networks. Technical Report UF-CIS-TR-97-021, CISE Department, University of Florida. Gainesville, FL (USA), November 1997.
• 14: IBM. CommonRules 3.1. http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/commonrules.
• 15: ILOG. Business rule components. http://www.ilog.com/products/rules/, August 2001.
• 16: N. Jennings, P. Faratin, T. Norman, P. O'Brien, and B. Odgers. Autonomous agents for business process management. International Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence, 14(2):145-189, 2000.
• 17: Daniel Jurafsky , James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2000
• 18: Eleanna Kafeza , Dickson K. W. Chiu , Irene Kafeza, View-Based Contracts in an E-Service Cross-Organizational Workflow Environment, Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Technologies for E-Services, p.74-88, September 14-15, 2001
• 19: Gerti Kappel , S. Rausch-Schott , Werner Retschitzegger, Coordination in Workflow Management Systems - A Rule-Based Approach, Coordination Technology for Collaborative Applications - Organizations, Processes, and Agents [ASIAN 1996 Workshop], p.99-120, January 1998
• 20: Steven O. Kimbrough, On ESTheta Theory and the Logic of the X12 Date/Time Qualifiers, Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences-Volume 5, p.176, January 06-09, 1998 [doi>10.1109/HICSS.1998.648311]
• 21: Steven Orla Kimbrough, Reasoning about the objects of attitudes and operators: towards a disquotation theory for representation of propositional content, Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, p.186-195, May 2001, St. Louis, Missouri, United States [doi>10.1145/383535.383557]
• 22: S. Kimbrough and Y. Tan. On lean messaging with unfolding and unwrapping for electronic commerce. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 5(1), 2000.
• 23: M. Koetsier, P. Grefen, and J. Vonk. Cross-organisational workflow: CrossFlow ESPRIT E/28635 contract model, deliverable D4b. Technical report, CrossFlow consortium, 1999.
• 24: M. Merz, E. Griffel, T. Tu, S. Muller-Wilken, H. Weinreich, M. Boger, and W. Lamersdorf. Supporting electronic commerce transactions with contracting services. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, 7(4):249-274, December 1998.
• 25: D. P. Miranker. TREAT: A better match algorithm for AI production system matching. In Proceedings of the 6th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 42-47, Seattle, WA, July 1987. Morgan Kaufmann.
• 26: T. Parsons. Events in the Semantics of English: A Study in Subatomic Semantics. MIT Press, 1990.
• 27: N. Paton and O. Diaz. Active database systems. ACM Computing Surveys, 1(31), 1994.
• 28: Werner Retschitzegger, Composite Event Management in TriGS - Concepts and Implementation, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, p.1-15, August 24-28, 1998
• 29: G. Riley. CLIPS: A tool for building expert systems. http://www.ghg.net/clips/CLIPS.html, August 2001.
• 30: C. Schlenoff, M. Gruniger, F. Tissot, J. Valois, J. Lubell, and J. Lee. The Process Specification Language (PSL) overview and version 1.0 specification. Technical Report NISTIR 6459, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 2000.
• 31: Marc-Thomas Schmidt, The Evolution of Workflow Standards, IEEE Concurrency, v.7 n.3, p.44-52, July 1999 [doi>10.1109/4434.788778]
• 32: Amit P. Sheth , Wil van der Aalst , Ismailcem B. Arpinar, Processes Driving the Networked Economy, IEEE Concurrency, v.7 n.3, p.18-31, July 1999 [doi>10.1109/4434.788776]
• 33: John F. Sowa, Knowledge representation: logical, philosophical and computational foundations, Brooks/Cole Publishing Co., Pacific Grove, CA, 1999
• 34: Michael Stonebraker , Greg Kemnitz, The POSTGRES next generation database management system, Communications of the ACM, v.34 n.10, p.78-92, Oct. 1991 [doi>10.1145/125223.125262]
• 35: C. Thorpe and J. Bailey. Commercial Contracts. Kogan Page Limited, 1999.
• 36: D. Tombros. An Event- and Repository-based Component Framework for Workflow System Architecture. PhD thesis, University of Zurich, 1999.
• 37: W. van der Aalst. Three good reasons for using a Petrinet-based workflow management system. In S. Navathe and T. Wakayama, editors, Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Information and Process Integration in Enterprises (IPIC'96), pages 179-201, Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 1996.
• 38: Jennifer Widom, The Starburst Active Database Rule System, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, v.8 n.4, p.583-595, August 1996 [doi>10.1109/69.536251]
• 39: Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC). The workflow reference model: Issue 1.1. http://www.wfmc.org/standards/docs.htm, 1995.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.1 Office Automation
          Subjects: Workflow management

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.1 Applications and Expert Systems
          Subjects: Office automation; Law

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Languages, Legal Aspects, Management

Keywords:
conflict detection, conflict resolution, contracts, policies