Supervision of Constraint-Based Processes: A Declarative Perspective

Constraint-based processes require a set of rules that limit their behavior to certain boundaries. Declarative languages are better suited to modeling these processes precisely because they facilitate the declaration of little or no business rules. These languages define the activities that must be performed to produce the expected results but not define exactly how these activities should be performed. The present paper proposes a new approach to deal with constraint-based processes. The proposed approach is based on supervisory control theory, a formal foundation for building controllers for discrete-event systems. The controller proposed in this paper monitors and restricts execution sequences of tasks such that constraints are always obeyed. We demonstrate that our approach can be used as a declarative language for constraint-based processes.