Combining Rules and Activities for Modeling Service-Based Business Processes

It is widely acknowledged that business process management would greatly benefit from integration with business rule management. But there is still no established solution to this integration problem, and the leading business process modeling language, BPMN, does not provide any explicit support for rules. In this paper, we are going to investigate the extension of BPMN by adding rules as a modeling concept in the form of a new gateway type, using the principles of Model-Driven Engineering. The integration will be done on the level of the metamodels of the involved languages, resulting in a new rule-based process modeling language called rBPMN (Rule-based BPMN).