Clifford Heath wrote:
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>> Aside from the obvious entrenched position of the Pi-Calculus in 
>> business process modeling, I don't see much other than another 
>> beautiful theory walking alone on a dark and stormy night in a very 
>> bad neighborhood. :)
>
> Ed, have you seem the YAWL workflow engine from Queensland
> University of Technology and the DSTC? It's formally based
> on Petri nets. I had a play with it a while back, but didn't
> see it as mature (read, overburdened with pre-canned features)
> to easily make use of in a commercial environment (which was
> my interest). Granted that you might be using Petri nets
> mainly for things other than business workflow automation,
> but I'd like your opinion on the chance YAWL might have to
> change things in the BPML space.
As Deep Throat said in "All The President's Men," follow the money. :) 
There are two entrenched 800-pound gorillas. I've forgotten the names, 
but one is based on Petri nets and the other on Pi-Calculus, and some 
kind of "both sides win" integration of the two is emerging. I think 
there's virtually zero chance of something else making headway. So I 
suppose I'll need to learn the subset of Pi-calculus that ends up in the 
final mix.
> My interest in business process is where I see it tying in with
> fact-based information modeling. It would seem a shame to mix a
> revolutionary yet well-founded technique like Object Role Modeling
> with the abortion that is BPML, when it could instead be mixed
> with a similarly foundational technology based on Petri nets.
Well ... to my knowledge, Pi-calculus can *directly* model "mobility", 
and Petri nets can't. It's been a while since I read the book, and I've 
lent my copy out to a co-worker who's more directly involved with 
business process modeling. My interest is pretty much only in computer 
systems performance modeling, and there (generalized) stochastic Petri 
nets are about the most complicated tool I need, and perhaps 99 percent 
of what I need to do can be handled by even simpler tools based on 
product form queuing networks. That's the source of my bias towards 
Petri nets -- they've been around a long time and predate most of the 
other analysis tools for dealing with concurrency. In fact, I think they 
predate the fundamental theorem of product form queuing networks.
>
> Clifford Heath.
>
>


-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.net/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.