Cristal - Design-Time RAL Solver

We have implemented a prototype to solve RAL expressions at design time, and it has been integrated as a plug-in in Oryx. Oryx is an academic Open Source project for business process management. It is extendable, so users can add new features to this powerful process modelling infrastructure.

To try our plugin you can follow these steps:

Open Firefox and go to http://labs.isa.us.es:8080/backend/poem/repository , where you can find the installation of Oryx containing the RAL Solver plugin.

We have already created a public business process model called �ConferenceTravelManagement_ICSOC11� to help users try the plugin, so they do not need to create a new business process model from scratch. Double click on the process �ConferenceTravelManagement_ICSOC11� and it opens.

The user can select any activity of the BP and introduce a RAL expression as explained below. Expressions are already configured in this example model for the sake of simplicity, but they can be modified.
Let us choose, for example, task �Submit Paper�. Then, in "More Properties" (right column) property �Resources� is used to introduce resource assignments.

RAL expressions can be introduced in field ResourceAssignmentExpression of the emerging window, by clicking on button �Add� of the menu bar.

Imagine that we want to constraint the potential performers of activity "Submit Paper" so that "Only Researchers and Research Assistants are authorized to execute this task, and they must have a degree".

Then, the next RAL expression should be added to the activity:

((HAS ROLE Researcher) OR (HAS ROLE ResearchAssistant))

AND (HAS CAPABILITY Degree)

Now we can call the RAL solver to process this expression, so the members of the organization that comply with the RAL assignment will be returned. To do so, the user must click on the icon of the RAL Solver (represented with a green cruise), which displays the window of the plugin. The first requirement is to introduce the organizational structure in which the process is used. In this case, we propose to use the instantiation explained in Section ISA group ontology of this web site, which is at https://www.isa.us.es/cristal/organization-isa.owl. By selecting activity "Submit Paper" we will obtain the members of the organization who may be assigned this activity at run time, i.e., the potential owners/performers of the activity.