Improving collaborative business process execution by traceability and expressiveness

The declarative modeling approach promises to be a suitable means for the description of rather unforeseen and less rigid business processes. However, today's approaches for the execution of such declarative processes lack certain essential capabilities. One of those is traceability which means that the actions proposed by the execution engine are explained and justified. Furthermore, expressivity is mostly limited to static temporal dependencies that lead to a simple temporal ordering of process steps without a proper connection to process perspectives like incorporated data, agents performing the work and utilized tools. Finally, due to their core principles, today's declarative execution engines suffer from scalability issues. This article outlines a concept and a prototypical implementation of an execution engine that aims to solve the above issues and integrates with current business process frameworks.