ReFlex: An Efficient Graph-Based Rule Engine to Execute Declarative Processes

Declarative Business Processes offer more flexibility to business processes by the use of business rules. Such business rules describe what must or must not be done during the process execution, but do not prescribe how. To fully experience the benefits of this modeling approach, companies need a rule engine capable of checking the rules and guiding the user through the execution of the process. The rule engines available today present several limitations that impair their use to this application. In particular, the well-known approach that employs Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) has the drawback of the state space explosion as the process model grows. This paper proposes a novel graph-based rule engine that does not share the problems presented by other engines, being better suited to model declarative business processes than the techniques currently in use.