Web-Based Modelling and Collaborative Simulation of Declarative Processes

Abstract

As a provider of Electronic Case Management solutions to knowledge-intensive businesses and organizations, the Danish company Exformatics has in recent years identified a need for flexible process support in the tools that we provide to our customers. We have addressed this need by adapting DCR Graphs, a formal declarative workflow notation developed at the IT University of Copenhagen. Through close collaboration with academia we first integrated execution support for the notation into our existing tools, by leveraging a cloud-based process engine implementing the DCR formalism. Over the last two years we have taken this adoption of DCR Graphs to the next level and decided to treat the notation as a product of its own by developing a stand-alone web-based collaborative portal for the modelling and simulation of declarative workflows. The purpose of the portal is to facilitate end-user discussions on how knowledge workers really work, by enabling collaborative simulation of processes. In earlier work we reported on the integration of DCR Graphs as a workflow execution formalism in the existing Exformatics ECM products. In this paper we report on the advances we have made over the last two years, we describe the new declarative process modelling portal, discuss its features, describe the process of its development, report on the findings of an initial evaluation of the usability of the tool, resulting from a tutorial on declarative modelling with DCR Graphs that we organized at last years BPM conference and present our plans for the future.

Full text

[INDUSTRY PAPER]Web-based Modelling and
Collaborative Simulation of Declarative Processes
Morten Marquard1, Muhammad Shahzad1,2, and Tijs Slaats1,3
1Exformatics A/S, Dag Hammarskj¨
olds All´
e 13, DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
{mmq, ts}@exformatics.com, http://www.exformatics.com
2TEO International
muhammad.shahzad@teo-intl.com
3IT University of Copenhagen
Abstract. As a provider of Electronic Case Management solutions to knowledge-
intensive businesses and organizations, the Danish company Exformatics has in
recent years identified a need for flexible process support in the tools that we pro-
vide to our customers. We have addressed this need by adapting DCR Graphs, a
formal declarative workflow notation developed at the IT University of Copen-
hagen. Through close collaboration with academia we first integrated execution
support for the notation into our existing tools, by leveraging a cloud-based pro-
cess engine implementing the DCR formalism. Over the last two years we have
taken this adoption of DCR Graphs to the next level and decided to treat the nota-
tion as a product of its own by developing a stand-alone web-based collaborative
portal for the modelling and simulation of declarative workflows. The purpose of
the portal is to facilitate end-user discussions on how knowledge workers really
work, by enabling collaborative simulation of processes. In earlier work we re-
ported on the integration of DCR Graphs as a workflow execution formalism in
the existing Exformatics ECM products. In this paper we report on the advances
we have made over the last two years, we describe the new declarative process
modelling portal, discuss its features, describe the process of its development, re-
port on the findings of an initial evaluation of the usability of the tool, resulting
from a tutorial on declarative modelling with DCR Graphs that we organized at
last years BPM conference and present our plans for the future.
Keywords: Declarative Modelling, DCR Graphs, Web-Based Process Modelling, Col-
laborative Process Simulation, Process Flexibility, Knowledge Work
1 Introduction
Former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, Robert Reich, argued that the
competitiveness of nations depends on the education and skills of it’s people and on the
infrastructure connecting people with one another [21] He segmented the work force
into three types of employees (1) routine production services, (2) ”in-person” services
and (3) symbolic analysts. Today we often refers to symbolic analysts as knowledge
workers [3, 5], the employees which contribute to most of the economic growth in de-
veloped economies. Therefore, supporting these knowledge workers and ensuring easy

2 Morten Marquard, Muhammad Shahzad, and Tijs Slaats
and smooth collaboration is important to compete globally. Enabling knowledge work-
ers to work smarter, rather than just harder, involves various IT infrastructures to ensure
communication and collaboration.
Traditional process initiatives, typically seen in the automobile indutry, focus on
what Reich refers to as routine production services. While increasing productivity and
cutting costs in primary industries is important to compete globally, it is even more
important to provide similar support for knowledge workers. Comparing tools and pro-
cesses used in the automobile industry with knowledge intensive industries will proba-
bly reveal a paradox. The infrastructure supporting routine production services is much
more advanced what is found supporting knowledge workers. Often knowledge work-
ers use email as their primary communication and collaboration tool, and studies shows
that knowledge workers on average spend 28 percentage of the time reading and re-
sponding to emails [13]. This is hardly efficient and makes it hard to compete in a
global economy, especially as knowledge workers in the developing countries has cheap
and easy access to secretary and other in-person services, and therefore simply will be
more serviced than knowledge workers in the developed countries. The engineers, doc-
tors, financial analysts in the western world simply need to work harder as they cannot
leverage cheap primary services. Therefore, providing infrastructure and techniques for
knowledge workers is critical to compete globally. McKinsey Global Institute estimate a
productivity gain of 20-25 percentage on average knowledge workers by using modern
social technologies.
In the effort to make knowledge workers more productive ideas and techniques
found in the routine production services, like the automobile industry, has been adopted
in the hope that it can support knowledge workers.
Over the last decades business has tried to model their business processes in order to
increase productivity and increase quality. Many techniques and notations exists, but the
Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) [19,27] is at the center of most initia-
tives. Processes are visualized using BPMN, Swimlanes diagrams, flow charts etc. As
most notations cannot describe the whole process, many descriptions are supplemented
with textual descriptions typically found in a Word document. Engaging end-users in
the process dialogue is hard as the notation is hard to understand. Many initiatives
within the process space has been trying to simplify the notation and methods. Lack
of end-user engagement often leads to process implementations not supporting the real
business need. We’ve also witnessed that people interpret processes in different ways
and that a large degree of implicit logic is assumed from the process. This makes it very
hard for others to read it and ultimately leads to failure of many process initiatives.
In order to achieve the overall business goals, increased productivity, higher quality
and employee enthusiasm, we propose a new model, collaborative process simulation.
To ensure employee engagement we propose to play the processes like a computer game
among co-workers. The team of co-workers can define the process using a declarative
process-model and immediately start process simulation in order to verify whether the
modelled processes meet the real world need.
During simulations end-users often asks questions like what happens if...,can we
do ... etc. These questions can be simulated in the tool and the process model adjusted
to meet the increased understanding of the process. Rather than looking for the right

Web-based Modelling and Collaborative Simulation of Declarative Processes 3
process, we empower employees to modify processes as core-business processes are
adjusted to meet changing business needs and requirements.
The industry standard BPMN notation is founded in the concept of flow; the idea
that to describe the behaviour of a process one needs to describe how control passes
(flows) between its activities. It has been observed however that the flow-based paradigm
is not ideal for knowledge-centred processes: knowledge workers deal with very diverse
problems which rarely ”fit the mould”, instead of being given predefined sequences of
tasks they often need to decide themselves what actions they should take based on their
expert knowledge. The IT systems that support them therefore need to be able of of-
fering a large degree of flexibility. [17, 22, 28] Such flexible processes exhibit a large
degree of variability, exhibited in flow-based models by many different possible paths
and states, which leads to so-called spaghetti models which are no longer understand-
able by users.
As an alternative a new declarative or constraint-based paradigm has been proposed
[7,10,18, 20,24]. The declarative paradigm is grounded in the idea that one should only
model the constraints (or business rules) of a process and then derive the possible paths
from the constraints. Any execution allowed by the constraints is a valid execution of
the process model, i.e. the workers are given maximal flexibility within the rules.
Exformatics is a Danish software developer providing Electronic Case Management
(ECM) solutions to knowledge-intensive businesses and organizations such as LEGO,
ISS, ministries and government institutions. Already from their creation they realised
the need for flexible processes support in their tools and in initial versions this was
solved by very rough process definitions that only grouped tasks within specific phases,
but otherwise left maximal flexibility to the users. They realised that this approach
lacked the ability of adding more meaningful rules and constraints to their processes
and through participation in a Danish knowledge network Infinit [1], which supports
interaction and dissemination between academia and industry they came into contact
with the Process Models group at the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU) which was
working on related issues and in particular has developed the DCR Graphs notation
[4, 7, 8, 16]. DCR Graphs is a declarative notation for flexible processes that sets itself
apart from other declarative notations such as Declare by utilizing only a very small
set of constraints, yet yielding high formal expressive power. In addition it offers a
straightforward run-time semantics formalized as transformations of the graphs, which
means that its visual representation can be used both at design-time to represent process
definitions and at run-time to represent process instances, in a similar manner as Petri-
nets.
Exformatics became very interested in the work on DCR Graphs and how they
could employ the notation to leverage flexible processes. Therefore they initiated a
close collaboration with the researchers at ITU, facilitated through various Danish fund-
ing mechanisms supporting university-industry collaboration [?]. Most notable among
these was a 3 years industrial PhD project, where Exformatics employed a PhD student
to do research on flexible process notations while at the same time being enrolled at
ITU.
During this project DCR Graphs were first integrated into the existing ECM tools as
a formalism for process-control by implementing a cloud-based process engine based

4 Morten Marquard, Muhammad Shahzad, and Tijs Slaats
on the DCR Graphs semantics [23]. At the same time the student also developed a pro-
totype tool for the graphical modelling of DCR Graphs which was well received within
the company and opened the road to further adaptation of DCR Graphs not only as an
internalized notation for standardized processes, but also as a graphical notation for de-
signing processes as a part of business consultancy services, in essence making DCR
Graphs a product of their own. This was achieved by developing a stand-alone web-
based collaborative portal for the modelling and simulation of declarative workflows,
aimed at facilitating end-user discussion on how knowledge workers really work, by
enabling collaborative simulation and run-time adaptation of processes.
This paper focuses on this new declarative process portal. We start by giving a short
introduction to DCR Graphs. We then give a detailed overview of the portal and its
features, discuss the development processes that led to its creation and discuss initial
efforts at evaluating the usability of the portal. We finalize by discussing our plans for
the future, both in terms of new features to the portal and new avenues of research.
1.1 Related Work
Several web-based commercial tools exist for the modelling of business processes; such
as Signavio, IBM Blueworks Live and Oracles Business Process Management Suite.
However, to our knowledge DCRGraphs.net is the first web-based modelling tool aimed
in particular its constraint-based notations for flexible processes.
Currently there is ongoing work on developing the Case Management Model And
Notation (CMMN) [18], which is a new standard notation developed by the Object
Management Group aimed in particular at case management and adding support for
flexible processes to BPMN. The work on CMMN is strongly inspired on the research
on the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) model [11] developed at IBM Research, which
in turn is based on earlier work on artifact-centric business processes [2]. While GSM
is foremost a data-centric model it has some declarative influences as well, the main
elements of the notation are stages containing tasks, which are either active or inactive
based on guards defined on the stage. The acceptance criteria of a stage are modelled
through milestones, which can in turn be part of the guards of other stages. Compared
to GSM, DCR Graphs put more focus on the behaviour of tasks and events then on the
data of the process.
Declarative process languages came to prominence in the BPM community through
the development of the Declare notation [20, 25, 26]. Declare consists of a relatively
large set of constraints typically found in business processes, which are traditionally
mapped to Linear Temporal Logic(LTL) formulae, although other formalizations also
exist [12, 14, 15]. DCR Graphs differ from Declare in the number of symbols used in
the notation: Declare uses a large number of constraint templates, each with their own
symbol where as DCR Graphs is limited to 5 elementary relations. Also, because the
runtime semantics of DCR Graphs are given in terms of transformations on their mark-
ing, it is straightforward to visualize and reason about the simulation of DCR Graphs.
Exforamtics adopted DCR Graphs in part because of their close research collaboration
with ITU, giving them direct access to the researchers behind the notation, because they
preferred a more concise notation and put particular importance into reasoning about

Web-based Modelling and Collaborative Simulation of Declarative Processes 5
the runtime of processes through simulation. We are not aware of any published work
reporting on industrial use of Declare.
2 Hierarchical DCR Graphs
In this section we exemplify DCR Graphs and their semantics using an abstracted ver-
sion of the main case management process of the Exformatics ECM system.
Case
Case Manager
Archive Case
Create Meeting
Post To Activity
Stream
Create Document
%
▼
Fig. 1. Root Case Management Process
In figure 1 we start with the root pro-
cess. The main building blocks of a
DCR Graph are the events (or activities),
drawn as a box with a bar on top. The
box contains the name of the activity and
the bar contains the roles that are able
of executing it. Our process has a sin-
gle role: the case manager. Activities can
be grouped together by nesting them un-
der a super-activity, in which case only
the atomic activities are executable. Such
grouping are a graphical shorthand for
applying constraints or properties to mul-
tiple activities at once: in our process
the super-activity Case having the role
Case Manager means that the case
manager is able of executing every atomic activity nested under it.Constraints or busi-
ness rules can be added to the model by adding one of five relations, drawn as direc-
tional arrows between activities. The root process contains a single relation, the exclu-
sion relation (→%) from Archive Case to Case. The exclusion relation is used to
remove activities from the process, for example to close tasks that should no longer
be executable, or to model an exclusive choice between two activities. Because the
super-activity Case acts as a grouping the exclusion relation applies to all five of the
underlying activities. This means that after archiving the case no further actions can be
taken as it removes all activities from the process. Following the declarative paradigm
unconstrained activities can be done at any time and any number of times, therefore the
process supports many different runs: one could for example upload two documents,
create a meeting, upload another document and finally archive the case. Note that while
Archive Case closes the process by removing all activities, it is not required to
happen and the previous example run would also have been valid if it had not ended by
archiving the case.
Figure 2 shows the process for organizing a meeting. Similarly to the previous ex-
ample we use the exclusion relation to remove activities from the process when they are
no longer relevant: the activities Invite Participants,Change Date,Hold
Meeting and Cancel Meeting are grouped together and removed by either hold-
ing or cancelling the meeting. Only after holding the meeting is it possible to upload the
minutes of the meeting, this is modelled by the condition relation (→•) which states that
before Upload Minutes can be done we first need to have done Hold Meeting.

6 Morten Marquard, Muhammad Shahzad, and Tijs Slaats
Case Manager
Upload Minutes
Case Manager
Invite Participants
Hold Meeting
!
Change Date
Cancel Meeting
%
▼
%
▼
%
▼
▼
Fig. 2. Meeting Sub-process
Cancel Meeting excludes this activity since it does not make sense to upload min-
utes for a meeting that was cancelled. Finally the goal of the meeting sub-process is
that we either eventually hold the meeting or cancel it. This is modelled by making
Hold Meeting apending response, drawn by adding a blue exclamation mark to the
activity box. A pending response denotes that an activity should either happen or be
removed from the process before we can finish or close the process; in our example
either Hold Meeting needs to be done or Cancel Meeting needs to exclude it.
Checkin
Case Manager
Checkout
Case Manager
Download
Case Manager
%
▼
%
▼
+
▼
+
▼
▼
Fig. 3. Document Handling Sub-process
Figure 3 shows the pro-
cess for managing a
document in the ECM.
To edit the document
a user needs to check
it out, the file is then
locked until it is checked
in again. This is mod-
elled using first the ex-
clusion relation to exclude each activity when they happen (meaning they can only be
done once at a time) and the two new include relations (→+) between the two events.
The include relation is used to add removed activities back into the process, so in this
case, when Checkout happens, it removes itself and add Checkin to the process and
vice versa. Finally when a file is checked out we always want it to be checked in again
before the process can finish. We model this through the response relation (•→) which
is a dynamic version of the pending response that we introduced earlier. It denotes that
after Checkout is executed we require Checkin to be executed (or excluded) at least
once before we can close the process. It is always possible to download the document
through the unconstrained Download activity.
Finally we would like to tie all these process together into a single process describ-
ing the handling of a case in the ECM system. For this we use an extension called hier-
archical DCR (Hi-DCR) Graphs, which adds a notion of spawnable multi-instance sub-
processes. Figure 4 shows the case management process as a Hi-DCR Graph. The main
new concept are the two new sub-processes Meeting and Document Handling,

Web-based Modelling and Collaborative Simulation of Declarative Processes 7
Document Handling
Meeting
Case
|||
|||
Case Manager
Archive Case
Create Meeting
Post To Activity
Stream
Create Document
Case Manager
Download
Case Manager
Case Manager
Upload Minutes
Case Manager
Cancel Meeting
Checkout
Invite Participants
Hold Meeting
!
Change Date
%
▼
%
▼
+
▼
▼
▼
▼
▼
▼
%
▼
%
▼
▼
%
▼
▼
%
▼
▼
%
▼
Checkin
▼
%
+
▼
Fig. 4. Case Management Process
drawn as a box without a bar on top of it. These are essentially DCR Graphs inside the
root process that need to be initialized through the new spawn relation (→∗), creating
a new copy of the sub-process for each time it is spawned. In the example the activ-
ity Create Meeting spawns a new copy of Meeting each time it is executed and
Create Document and Create Minutes create a new Document Handling
process each time they are executed.
When one has a relation between an event of a sub-process and an event of its par-
ent, the relation will apply to each instance of the event. For example a case can not be
archived while there are pending meetings; this is modelled by adding a condition from
Hold Meeting to Archive Case, meaning that while there is at least one Hold
Meeting-activity that has not yet been executed or excluded (by cancel meeting), it
is impossible to execute Archive Case. In a similar manner it should not be pos-
sible to archive the case while documents are checked out. We model this through the
milestone relation (→), which blocks an event as long as some other event is pending.
Because of the response relation from Checkout to Checkin, there will be a pending
response on the latter whenever the file is checked out. The milestone from Checkin to
Archive Case ensures that as long as there is at least one instance of Checkin that
is pending, we can not archive the case. Finally, to archive the case, Archive Case
excludes all instances of all events in Document Handling, except for Download
as it should still be possible to download files. All instances of Upload Minutes are
also excluded, it is not necessary to exclude the other events in Meeting as this will
already have been done by holding or cancelling the meeting and unless one of these
has been executed the case can not be archived.

8 Morten Marquard, Muhammad Shahzad, and Tijs Slaats
The example DCR Graphs from figures 1, 2 and 3 are all available on DCRGraphs.net,
the Hi-DCR Graph in figure 4 was drawn using the development version of the portal
which is not yet ready for release.
3 The DCR Graphs Process Portal
dcrgraphs.net provide a solution for DCR Graphs management with collaboration for
registered users. It provides online web based tool for creating and editing DCR graphs,
which is also integrated to DCR processes engine services to simulate the graphs even
with friends or automated users invited to simulation. The simulation takes place in a
collaborative environment where each participant can contribute/interact.
dcrgraphs.net provides easy management for DCR graphs as well as sharing graphs
with friends and co-workers. Each graph has it’s own activity stream where discussions
about the graph can take place among people having access to the graph. A global
activity stream provides an overall discussion forum for people using dcrgraphs.net.
dcrgraphs.net supports several organisations, with the public organisation as the de-
fault organisation for users. Users can invite other users to use the portal simply be en-
tering their email addresses. Users can easily create new graphs here and manage their
existing graphs, they can also visit graphs shared to them or graphs which are public for
all. Activity stream provides a general mechanism to communicate and discuss/com-
ment either about a specific graph or in organization, well known from social medias
like LinkedIN and Facebook. Activity stream also support common social features like
most of sites have such as like, comment, picture upload.
Fig. 5. dcrgraphs.net frontpage
Users have their profiles and friends whom with they can simulate or share graphs,
and they can also invite anyone on the site by email. Portal also supports external logins
like LinkedIN and Facebook which can automatically retrieve the basic information of

Web-based Modelling and Collaborative Simulation of Declarative Processes 9
user’s account ready to be registered. The portal provides social aspects for users to
easily workaround there graphs in collaboration by providing such functionalities.
dcrgraphs.net has an online web based DCR Graph editor for users to easily create
and edit their graphs. It provide the GUI for the users to easily create graphs like any
other graphical editing tools. Activities and sub-processes can easily be added and var-
ious properties edited. The DCR Editor supports import of standard DCR XML [23]
and can export the Graph in XML, SVG, PNG formats to be easily used in other ap-
plications. Easy to use interface for creating and managing graph resources plus the
collaborative simulation sits within this editor.
Fig. 6. dcrgraphs.net editor
The Editor also supports revisions management and major versions for changes
made in normal state i.e. when not in simulation, which can be used to roll back the
changes to any previous version or preview changes. Besides the drag and drop creation
of the Elements in Graph a wizard is also provided for creating graph content much
rapidly.
As DCR graphs are often complex features to filter events based on role and level
has been added. Thereby the users can select to view specific aspects of the graph de-
pending on their need.
In order to facilitate discussion and collaboration among co-workers, easy access to
the activity stream of the graph has been provided from within the editor.
dcrgraphs.net support online collaborative simulations of processes which can be
shared among a group of people. A process-coordinator can invite friends to participate
in the simulation playing different roles in a particular process. The friends can choose
to join the simulation and participate on their own computer independently of phys-
ical location. Once the simulation starts the users plays different roles in the process
simulation.
Users can invite their friends or choose system automated users in the simulation
and assign roles to the invitees for them to take part in simulation. Simulations can be
paused/resumed, edited and restarted at any point during the runtime and a record of

10 Morten Marquard, Muhammad Shahzad, and Tijs Slaats
each successful completed simulation is kept in the system which can be later viewed.
Its called simulation replay in the Editor. During simulation available activities with
visual cue is also available for the contributes also with filtration of the activities and
with collaboration everyone has updates what’s happening in simulation.
During the simulation the activities executed are logged in the Execution Log, which
can be used later to replay the simulation. An activity (task) list displays activities which
are either required to complete the process or enabled to be executed. Whenever a activ-
ity is executed it is marked and the process continues. For every activity execution the
simulation invokes the process engine to modify and register the state of the process,
which typically results in new and/or changes to the existing activities.
Fig. 7. dcrgraphs.net simulation
The task list displays the current state of the process, i.e. whether the process can
be considered completed or more activities most be executed to complete the process.
The participants in the process are listed during simulation with the roles they play
in the current simulation.
The simulation can be paused by the process-coordinator and edited to support
changing requirements found during simulation. Later the simulation can be resumed
from the last point.
3.1 Key features
During development we’ve addressed set of key requirements which we’ve found im-
portant to implement in order to serve the overall business purpose, ensuring knowl-
edge workers participate in the description and further development of their business
processes.
Auto-user execution
In order to enable users to simulate processes alone, or give various roles to ”au-
tomatic users”, we’ve created two roles, a lazy and aggressive users. The lazy user

Web-based Modelling and Collaborative Simulation of Declarative Processes 11
executed only pending activities it is responsible for. The aggressive user executes
any enabled event it is responsible for, whether pending or not. The idea is to enable
simulation where the process editor only plays a one or few roles while assigning
other roles to automatic users. Ultimately, all roles could be assigned to automatic
users which would result in a ”video” playing the process.
Organisation
In order to support different organisations and universities, we’ve extended dcr-
graphs.net, which originally was intended as a public portal only, to support private
areas of users, graphs etc. This enables organisations and universities to setup their
own area, inviting their own employees and students, and define processes within a
closed community. As business processes are often sensitive we hope their model
will encourage organisations to setup private space within dcrgrahs.net. Users can
belong to several organisations, including a ”public” organisation, and can interact
with others.
Levels
We’ve added functionality to zoom-in and -out of the processes similar to zooming
in and out of Google Maps, to see more or less details of the process. Zooming out
enabled users to focus initially of the overall goal and purpose of the process, and
while zooming in more details are added which increase the details of the process.
Plugin framework
In order to enable 3rd party development, initially intended for student projects,
we’ve extended the portal and provide a plugin framework. We foresee a series
of development projects such as model checking (dead- and live-lock checking),
process visualisation (drawing ”happy paths”) etc. The details of the framework is
described on http://wiki.dcrgraphs.net.
Integrated to LinkedIN and Facebook
In order to smoothen user adoption we decided to leverage external portals like
Facebook and LinkedIN for providing user credentials and user profile informa-
tion. User registration can be accomplished simply by clicking on a LinkedIN or
Facebook icon. Then the user profile is retrieved from the 3rd party portal, typi-
cally after a login/approval process. When users return to dcrgraphs.net they can
re-login using their LinkedIN or Facebook credentials, therefore avoiding having
to remember several userid/passwords.
4 Development of the DCR Portal
Development of the portal has been carried out using the Scrum methodology, through
close co-operation between the development team at TEO International in Pakistan and
the design team at Exformatics in Denmark. We used short 2 to 3 week sprints with
frequent updates of the portal. Different technologies have been used to achieve the
solution so far, including: JavaScript with Rapha¨
el, jQuery, Microsoft .NET with MVC
4, REST services and the existing DCR Process Engine which was developed in a mix
of C# and F#. We are currently working on the 10th major version of the portal, which
will include support for sub-processes.

12 Morten Marquard, Muhammad Shahzad, and Tijs Slaats
The DCR Editor is purely a JavaScript application which utilizes REST services
developed in .NET to communicate with the web-server. The editor uses the Rapha¨
el
Library to visualize the graphs in SVG-format. Simulation of the graphs uses DCR pro-
cess engine services which have been upgraded over the time to support newly added
features. The wrapper of the Editor, which provides listing of the graphs, sharing, ac-
tivity stream and friendship functionalities is developed in MVC 4 .NET. Simulation in
Editor uses realtime notifications, updates with the help of Signal R which uses Web-
Sockets where possible. The editor utilizes caching techniques to minimize the requests
to server and improve the performance of the product.
5 Evaluation
At last years BPM conference we organized a tutorial on flexible business process mod-
elling using DCR Graphs where we first gave an introduction to DCR Graphs, exempli-
fying the notation through a demo of the process portal, then asked the audience to try
out the portal for themselves by doing a number of exercises and finally requested their
feedback in the form of a questionnaire.
Very Easy Easy Neutral Hard Very hard
Events (Activities) 4 5 2 1
Roles 5 5 1 1
Condition Relation 2 7 2
Response Relation 2 5 3 2
Inclusion Relation 1 2 4 5
Exclusion Relation 1 4 5 2
Pending response 1 5 4 1
Nesting 6 2 3
Table 1. Understandability of Concepts
Twelve people filled
out the questionnaire,
eleven identified as re-
searchers and one as
a practitioner. On aver-
age the attendants had
been active in the BPM
field for 5 years, rang-
ing from 6 months to
14 years. Five peo-
ple had previous experi-
ence with DCR Graphs,
whereas 9 people had previous experience with declarative modelling notations in gen-
eral.
Very Easy Easy Neutral Hard Very hard
Events(Activities) 3 7 2
Roles 3 4 4 1
Condition Relation 6 3 3
Response Relation 8 2 2
Inclusion Relation 5 5 2
Exclusion Relation 6 5 1
Pending response 7 3 2
Nesting 1 6 2 3
Table 2. Understandability of Notation
In the first set of
questions we asked the
audience if they found
the underlying concepts
of DCR Graphs hard
or easy to understand.
We specifically asked
them to only comment
on the understandabil-
ity of the concept and
not the graphical nota-
tion used. The results
are shown in table 1, perhaps not surprisingly most found events (9) and roles (10)
easy or very easy to understand. Of the relations the participants found the condition

Web-based Modelling and Collaborative Simulation of Declarative Processes 13
the easiest to understand, 9 people scored it easy or very easy, followed by the response
(7), exclusion (5) and finally inclusion (3). It is noteworthy that despite being closely
related the audience found the inclusion relation significantly harder to understand then
the exclusion relation, we conjecture that the exclusion more closely matches familiar
concepts such as mutual exclusion, whereas the inclusion relation was more novel to
the audience.
In the next set of questions we asked the audience to rate the understandability of
the graphical notation. Table 2 shows the results, overall events and roles were found
to be easy or very easy to understand, whereas the users were more neutral about the
notation of the relations. The condition and response scored higher then the inclusion
and exclusion, we conjecture that this may be because many attendants were already
familiar with the precedence and response constraints in Declare.
Very Easy Easy Neutral Hard Very hard
Modelling Screen 11 1
Adding Friends 1 6 2 1
Individual simulation 11 1
Collaborative simulation 6 2 1
Table 3. Usability of the Tool
In our final set
of questions, whose
results are shown in
table 3, we focussed
on the tool itself
and asked the par-
ticipants to rate the
usability of its vari-
ous components. Both the modelling and simulation functionality scored high, with 11
people finding them easy to use and the final participant being neutral on their usability.
Adding connections scored a little less well, with 7 people finding this part of the tool
easy or very easy to use. Collaborative simulation scored only slightly lower, with 6
participants finding it easy to use, out of 9 people answering this particular question.
The portal has been used for teaching a process modelling course at ITU, with 75
users signed up. While we have not organized a similar questionnaire for the students,
overall the experience has been positive and no major issues were encountered in using
the portal. More recently we also initiated a collaboration with the Federal University
of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) where they use the portal for teaching a similar
course.
6 Future Work
We recognize that it is too early to draw strong conclusions from the questionnaire
based on a small number of academic participants. In the near future we plan to run
multiple industrial workshops following the same structure as the tutorial, both as a
method for raising awareness of the portal and attracting potential new customers and
as a way to receive additional feedback from actual practitioners which will allow us to
make stronger claims regarding its usability.
Further initiatives focus on:
Sub-processes
The ability to split processes into sub-processes which can be instantiated and exe-
cuted separately from the parent process. Experience from existing examples [6],
shows that sub-processes are important to model processes in an easy to describe

14 Morten Marquard, Muhammad Shahzad, and Tijs Slaats
and understandable model. Work on this item is already ongoing and we expect
to have sub-processes included in the live version of the portal by the summer of
2015.
Verification
Various mechanism has been developed to analyze DCR graphs for dead- and live-
lock. Adding such analysis to the tool is important, both when designing graphs
but also when adjusting DCR graphs running within a case management tool, like
Exformatics ECM. When the user adds new activities and/or constraints it might
lead to live- and dead-locks.
Gamification
We introduced Keith Swensson, author of various books on Adaptive Case Manage-
ment, to the DCR graphs at the Adaptive Case Management conference in Ulm in
august 2014, as well as at the Business Process Management (BPM) conference in
Eindhoven in September 2014. Keith suggested that we added more gamification
features to the portal and allow participants to earn points and credits in various
ways.
Collaborative Editing
Collaborative editing, a brilliant feature of Google Docs, has been suggested by
several users of dcrgraphs.net. As this goes well along with collaborative simulation
this is a feature we’re likely to add in the near future.
Time
Models for adding time to DCR graphs has been investigated [9] and will be added
to the semantics of the process engine and to the semantics of DCR graphs. When
simulating time we need a way to scale time, so, say, a day take 5 minutes, so
simulation can capture such events. We probably also need to have a global clock
which can be stopped by the process facilitator.
Probability and Cost of Events
DCR graphs allow many path from source to destination just like a GPS can provide
many different paths. The GPS knows which roads are highways and which are
small roads, and tries to find an optimal way with the given conditions. Modern
GPS system link up with live feed about average speed on various roads and include
such information into the calculation. An accident on the highway will guide drivers
onto secondary roads as this is faster in the given situation. We plan to mark DCR
graphs with similar information, initially statistics added to the graph like the type
of road added to the GPS. Long term we plan to capture statistics from process
mining to provide improved accuracy.
Process Mining
Process mining can be used to analyse logs obtained from various processes. While
analysis techniques will be fairly straightforward to integrate into the tools, new
research will need to be done on the discovery of DCR Graph based models.
Hybrid Techniques
Despite the simplicity of DCR graphs we often meet the argument that business
people are more familiar and accustomed with BPMN diagrams, swim-lanes and
flow-charts. As we argued in the introduction this familiarity is often not really the
case, as business process drawings are interpreted very different by business people.

Web-based Modelling and Collaborative Simulation of Declarative Processes 15
Nevertheless we feel that adding well known graphical models like swim-lanes will
ease adoption of DCR graphs within the business community.
7 Conclusion
Over the last decade, social technologies has experienced significant adoption and growth,
most siginificantly Facebook. Traditional social technologies enables people to commu-
nicate, but often lack ability to coordinate the various activities people participate in.
We believe DCR graphs can play a role in social technologies for such coordination.
Whether the coordination is developed manually by drawing DCR graphs or extracted
from various logs using process mining techniques we don’t know, and maybe the two
models can be combined.
Exformatics will continue to invest in declarative process technologies, and has en-
tered into a new collaboration initiative with IT University of Copenhagen and is partly
funding a Post.Doc. over the next two years. Further, Exformatics has hired Tijs Slaats,
PhD. student for three years, in a part time position also jointly with ITU. Further,
Exformatics participate in various industry initiatives, currently with a major Danish
financial institution which has worked with process modelling for many years but are
looking into declarative models to provide a more flexible process model.
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