Resolving Conflicts in Process Models with Temporal Constraints

Temporal constraints, temporal requirements, and temporal goals such as deadlines, durations, minimum and maximum time spans between events are important aspects of business processes. However, some of these aspects may happen to be in conflict with each other. Dynamic controllability emerged as the preferred notion expressing the absence of such conflicts. We propose a system that supports the design of processes with temporal constraints that are not in conflict. The system does not only check whether a designed process model with temporal constraints is admissible, i.e., dynamically controllable, but also delivers all the conflicting constraints that contribute to a violation of dynamic controllability. The system offers also the possibility to incrementally add and remove temporal constraints, and instantaneously check for absence of conflicts. Additionally, we provide an algorithm that computes the strictest temporal constraints between events, which can be added without introducing conflicts.