Business Process Modeling in INSPIRE Using Petri Nets

This paper introduces a notation for business process modeling and shows how it can be formally interpreted in terms of Petri nets. Petri nets have a quite respectable research community, which is 35 years old. However, they were only recently proposed for business process modeling. This is probably due to the fact they are often claimed to be “too complex” for this task. Nevertheless, they are quite well understood and the theory behind them is well developed, so we think they have a good potential for business process modeling, but more work needs to be done. In this paper we show that Petri nets can help in understanding formally the business process modeling notation developed in the Inspire project. This understanding can act as a basis for a future work on formal analysis of business process models developed with the INSPIRE tool. The Inspire project (IST-10387-1999) aims to develop an integrated tool-set to support a systematic and more human-oriented approach to business process re-engineering.