Process Invariants: An Approach to Model Expected Exceptions

Business processes benefit from context information provided by Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. However, business processes tend to have more and more conditions. Thus, the process modeler needs to include many expected exceptions in the process model. Consequently, it increases the number of variables and workflow complexity. The definition of such complexity is cumbersome, time consuming and deviates the process modeler from the main flow. In this paper we propose an alternative to model expected exceptions, allowing the process modeler to focus on the right process. We propose the process invariants concept, which allows a process modeler to define a set of conditions that must remain valid within a process scope. Additionally, we implement our proposal by extending BPMN with process invariants.