Abstracting Common Business Rules to Petri Nets (Abstract)

These days Business Information Systems (BIS) have a highly responsible task: they execute large parts of the business processes autonomously. So organiza-tions become more and more dependent on their BIS. Business processes usually require a certain order in which activities have to be executed. On top of that, there are many other business rules that should be met by the execution of business processes, e.g., the famous Sarbanes-Oxley rules (cf. [1]) and the Gen-eral Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Business rules can be required by any stakeholders, such as management, government, shareholders and business partners, both clients and suppliers. In this paper we take it for granted that a BIS has some unknown errors and that the system is for all stakeholders more or less a black box. Instead of a human auditor we propose here an approach where the BIS is extended by an independent monitor system that checks the essential business rules on the fly and that reports violations of business rules or that interrupts the BIS to prevent the occurrence of a violation. As basic terminology we use workflow notions such as task, case, agent an