Declarative enactment of BPMN processes - An approach based on streams and tables

Business processes are at the core of successful digital transformation. The execution of business processes requires an engine that is capable of understanding the process model and orchestrating its executions (i.e., informing the user/system on which activity should be executed for each process instance). Many engines are built to understand processes expressed in a specific language, and generalizing their logic to other languages is not trivial. In this paper, we present a novel approach to orchestrate process instances inspired by an existing data stream model, streams and tables. We encode execution semantics of BPMN using reactive SQL-like rules, the continuous query language (CQL). We discuss the overall architecture and cover the core BPMN elements by means of examples.