Extending CPN Tools with Ontologies to Support the Management of Context-Adaptive Business Processes

Colored Petri Nets (CPN) are a widely used graphical modeling language to manage business processes. Business processes often appear in dynamic environments; therefore, context adaptation has recently emerged as a new challenge to explicitly address fitness between business process modeling and its execution environment. Although CPN can introduce data by defining internal data records, this is not enough to capture the complexity and dynamics of the execution context data. This paper extends CPN tools to support the management of context-adaptive business processes. To achieve this challenge, CPN tools are integrated with ontology-based context models that properly represent and manage the business process context. This allows context to be appropriately modeled at design time, and queried and updated at runtime. The combination of ontologies with CPN tools presents a way to bridge business processes management with context data management while treating data and behavior as separate concerns. In this way, system design, reuse, and maintenance are also improved.