From Declarative Processes to Imperative Models

Nowadays organizations support their creation of value by explicitly defining the processes to be carried out. Processes are specifically discussed from the angle of simplicity, i.e., how compact and easy to understand they can be represented. In most cases, organizations rely on imperative models which, however, become complex and cluttered when it comes to flexibility and optionality. As an alternative, declarative modeling reveals to be effective under such circumstances. While both approaches are well known for themselves, there is still not a deep understanding of their semantic interoperability. With this work, we examine the latter and show how to obtain an imperative model out of a set of declarative constraints. To this aim, we devise an approach leading from a Declare model to a behaviorally equivalent Petri net. Furthermore, we demonstrate that any declarative control flow can be represented by means of a Petri net for which the property of safety always holds true.