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Describes an innovative pictorial representation of business rules which clarifies the interrelationships of data entities and semantic constraints to enhance the communication among different levels of management. This pictorial representation scheme can be implemented using a set of microcomputer‐based CASE tools, and the result provides a comprehensive view of all aspects of management activity.

An integral part of declarative process modelling is to guarantee that the execution of a declarative workflow is compliant with the respective business rules. The purpose of this paper is to establish a formal framework for representing business rules and determining whether any business rules are violated during the executions of declarative process models.

In the approach, a business rule is phrased in terms of restricted English that is related to a constraint template. Linear temporal logic (LTL) is employed as a formalism for defining the set of constraint templates. By exploiting the theorem-proving feature of the Logics Workbench (LWB), business rule violations are then detected in an automatic manner.

This study explored the viability of encoding: first, process executions by means of LTL and second, business rules in terms of restricted English that built upon pattern-oriented templates and LTL. The LWB was used for carrying out temporal reasoning through automated techniques. The applicability of the formal verification approach was exemplified by a case study concerning supply chain management. The findings showed that practical reasoning could be achieved by combining declarative process modelling, restricted English, pattern-oriented templates, LTL and LWB.

First, new business rule templates are proposed; second, business rules are expressed in restricted English instead of graphical constructs; third, both finite execution trace and business rules are grounded in LTL. There is no need to deal with the semantic differences between different formalisms; and finally, the theorem prover LWB is used for the conformance checking of a finite execution trace against business rules.

In this paper we present a roadmap for the elicitation of business rules based on different stakeholders' perspectives, in order to facilitate the processes of structuring, organizing and expressing business tactic and policy in a way that it is close to the business milieu and stakeholders' viewpoints.

This paper has derived from a combined research practice. Initially, the development of a roadmap for understanding different stakeholders' perspectives and for identifying their views on business tactics and policies was based on well‐grounded work on enterprise goal modelling, combined with a theoretical study of business rule – related concepts. The outcome of this work was tested against a real business case dealing with the development of an electronic procurement system in the pre‐fabricated construction sector.

As a conclusion, the paper put forward a comprehensive methodological framework for dealing with rule‐intensive projects. The proposed roadmap can help IT practitioners in collecting and organizing business rule statements that apply within a particular organization, either towards the implementation of change on a business level, or in the context of specifying the (existing or future) functionality of supporting information systems (IS).

The rule roadmap presented here has been coupled with a modelling approach for expressing rules in a structured, consistent manner and for organizing them in a rule repository. Future work includes the extension of this approach to cover design and implementation as part of rule‐centric information systems engineering.

Therefore, the overall contribution of this work relates to the provision of guidance for identifying business policy and tactics at an intentional level (through the investigation of the rationale behind them) and for transforming relevant models to the operational level, where business rules are linked to business processes, information and systems.

Although the business rule concept has been examined from different points of view over the past years, the paper attempts to bridge the gap between approaches that see rules as extensions of business goals, other approaches that consider rules as limitations on the way business activities are performed, and finally, approaches according to which rules constrain the creation, modification and deletion of information entities.

Business rules are statements that aim to influence or guide behavior and information in the organization. They are the business policies, the business practices, and business definitions that should be well known and treated as a valuable asset to the organization. They are in essence how the actual business is run. Yet so often these business rules are implicit, assumed in the development of information systems in an organization. They have been buried in code, lived in the business experts’ heads and sporadically been documented in system manuals. In this paper we examine the value of business rules, compare the thinking of business rule experts and provide guidelines on how to derive and store an organization’s business rules.

Changing scattered and dynamic business rules in business workflow systems has become a growing problem that hinders the use and configuration of workflow-based applications. There is a gap in the existing research studies which currently focus on solutions that are application specific, without accounting for the universal logical dependencies between the business rules and, as a result, do not support adaptation of the business rules in real time. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

To tackle the above problems, this paper adopts a bottom-up approach, which puts forward a component model of the business process workflows and then adds business rules which have clear logical semantics. This allows incremental development of the workflows and semantic indexing of the rules which govern them during the initial acquisition.

The paper introduces an event-driven model for development of business workflows which is purely logic-based and can be easily implemented using an object-oriented technology, together with a model of the business rules dependencies which supports incremental semantic indexing. It also proposes a two-level inference mechanism as a vehicle for controlling the business process execution and the process of adaptation of the business rules at real time based on propagating the dependencies.

The framework is strictly logical and completely domain-independent. It allows to account both synchronous and asynchronous triggering events as well as both qualitative and quantitative description of the conditions of the rules. Although our primary interest is to apply the framework to the business processes typical in the construction industry we believe our approach has much wider potential due to its strictly logical formalization and domain independence. In fact it can be used to control any business processes where the execution is governed by rules.

The framework could be applied to both large business process modelling tasks and small but very dynamic business processes like the typical digital business processes found in online banking or e-Commerce. For example, it can be used for adjusting security policies by adding the capability to adapt automatically the access rights to account for additional resources and new channels of operation which can be very interesting ion both B2C and B2B applications.

The potential scope of the impact of the research reported here is linked to the wide applicability of rule-based systems in business. Our approach makes it possible not only to control the execution of the processes, but also to identify problems in the control policies themselves from the point of view of their logical properties – consistency, redundancies and potential gaps in the logics. In addition to this, our approach not only increases the efficiency, but also provides flexibility for adaptation of the policies in real time and increases the security of the overall control which improves the overall quality of the automation.

The major achievement reported in this paper is the construction of a universal, strictly logic-based event-driven framework for business process modelling and control, which allows purely logical analysis and adaptation of the business rules governing the business workflows through accounting their dependencies. An added value is the support for object-oriented implementation and the incremental indexing which has been possible thanks to the bottom-up approach adopted in the construction of the framework.

Declarative process modelling is a constraint-centric approach that treats business rules as first-class citizens in business process models. Augmenting the declarative process modelling technique with capability to detect the constraint violations during business process execution is of crucial importance. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the modelling of business rules through a repository of pattern-oriented templates.

The semantics of the business rule templates is underpinned by linear temporal logic (LTL). Automated temporal reasoning is then conducted for determining whether process executions adhere to the business rules through the utilisation of the Logics Workbench (LWB). An application of the methodological framework is illustrated by a realistic case study on degree requirements verification.

To access the practicality of the approach, the case study of this paper is based on the verification of degree requirements, which is different from the domain area of the case study in the author’s prior work. The findings indicated that the temporal framework could be applied to the declarative process modelling in a consistent and efficient manner.

This paper is an extended version of the author’s earlier study. More details on the LTL and LWB are provided in the current study. The author introduces 17 new business rule templates and illustrates the utilisation of the new templates via a case study that belongs to a different domain area.

The main aim of this paper is to present the characteristics of business renovation efforts and research into some aspects of the business process and information modelling. Different business‐rule categories are discussed and the relationships that exist between business rules and other business‐related concepts are presented. The paper also introduces a business activity meta‐model as an integration link between business and information modelling. Its motivation is to help establish an environment in which business rules can be traced from their origin in the business environment through to their implementation in information systems.

Business process has become the core assets of many organizations and it becomes increasing common for most medium to large organizations to have collections of hundreds or even thousands of business process models. The purpose of this paper is to explore an alternative dimension to process mining in which the objective is to extract process constraints (or business rules) as opposed to business process models. It also focusses on an alternative data set – process models as opposed to process instances (i.e. event logs).

The authors present a new method of knowledge discovery to find business activity sequential patterns embedded in process model repositories. The extracted sequential patterns are considered as business rules.

The authors find significant knowledge hidden in business processes model repositories. The hidden knowledge is considered as business rules. The business rules extracted from process models are significant and valid sequential correlations among business activities belonging to a particular organization. Such business rules represent business constraints that have been encoded in business process models. Experimental results have indicated the effectiveness and accuracy of the approach in extracting business rules from repositories of business process models.

This research will assist organizations to extract business rules from their existing business process models. The discovered business rules are very important for any organization, where rules can be used to help organizations better achieve goals, remove obstacles to market growth, reduce costly mistakes, improve communication, comply with legal requirements, and increase customer loyalty.

There has very been little work in mining business process models as opposed to an increasing number of very large collections of business process models. This work has filled this gap with the focus on extracting business rules.

The emergence of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology promises enormous opportunities to shift business process automation up to the wire level. The purpose of this paper is to explore the methodology of incorporating business logics into RFID edge systems, and thereby facilitate the business process automation in the RFID‐applied environment.

Following the object‐oriented modelling perspective, concepts of classes, instances are deployed to characterise the runtime context of RFID business scenarios; event patterns are used to aggregate RFID tag read events into business meaningful events; and business rules are established to automate business transactions according to the elicited events.

The paper has emphasised the synergy between business process automation and automatic data acquisition, and has identified the inter‐relations between RFID tag read events, application‐level events, business rules, and business operations. The reported research has demonstrated a feasible scheme of incorporating business process control and automation into RFID‐enabled applications.

The paper analyses the characteristics of RFID data and event handling in relation to business rule modelling and process automation. The features of event‐relied awareness, context containment and overlapping, etc. are all captured and described by the proposed object‐oriented business model. The given data‐driven RFID middleware architecture can serve as one reference architecture for system design and development. Hence, the paper plays an important role in connecting automatic data acquisition and existing business processes, and thereby bridges the physical world and the digital world.

How do entrepreneurs use simple rules to build their business models? Based on an inductive study of three Chinese Internet and technology firms, the authors find that business models emerge from simple rules that entrepreneurs learn from their experience. Simple rules also guide entrepreneurs to actualize and exploit opportunities in the marketplace, and they can help business models evolve through market feedback, especially in internationalization. This paper aims to delve into the black box of entrepreneurial decision-making and offer a better depiction of the business model development process in uncertain and fast-changing environments and thus provide guidance for future entrepreneurs.

Following the case method (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2003), the authors first present a thick description of characteristics of three companies and the dynamics of their business models. They then code these descriptions into first-order measures. Finally, they aggregate these measures into abstract constructs. They constantly compare the theoretical constructs and the emerging theory with the existing literature on business models.

The authors generate three key insights from the findings: business models emerge from simple rules learned from entrepreneurs’ experience, simple rules help entrepreneurs exploit and actualize opportunities in the marketplace and simple rules help businesses expand and evolve business models through market feedback, especially in internationalization.

This paper falls into the intersection of strategy and entrepreneurship – an emerging new field of strategic entrepreneurship – and is concerned with how businesses create and sustain a competitive advantage while simultaneously identifying and exploiting new opportunities. The authors bring people – the individual decision-makers for businesses – back in strategy research and depict a more realistic picture of the behavior of successful entrepreneurs and their business model development process.