Coordinating Business Processes Using Semantic Relationships

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In enterprises, different business processes collaborate to achieve a common business goal. The processes involved in such a collaboration are connected to each other in
one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships. The
complex interdependencies between these processes require
proper process coordination. Current approaches addressing
process coordination rely on message exchanges between the
interacting processes with focus on syntax, while neglecting the semantics of these message exchanges between multiple processes. This paper introduces semantic relationships, a concept that provides the means to model process coordination based on message semantics, resulting in a high level of abstraction and thus facilitating process coordination. Semantic relationships incorporate the support for one-to-many and many-to-many process relations and affect process execution solely if required, allowing for concurrent and asynchronous process execution.