EPC Tools: Homepage

EPC Tools

EPC Tools is an open source initiative towards a tool for Event Driven Process Chains (EPCs) on the Eclipse platform. EPC Tools supports the tool indepedent EPC interchange format EPML.

EPC Tools supports the editing, simulation and analysis of the EPC process models. The organization and information aspects are not yet supported, but we hope to start the work on this soon.

The simulator implements the non-local semantics of EPCs (see references below) and checks some of its dynamic properties; in particular, it checks whether the EPC has a clean semantics. The simulator is based on a simple model checker, which was developed in the Model Checking in Education (MCiE) project at Paderborn University.

In January 2006, we have released EPC Tools 2. The major improvements of EPC Tools 2 are:

A new algorithm for calculating the semantics in an explicit way. Therefore, the simulation and analysis of EPCs is much faster now.
Since the explicit algorithm does not always come up with a result, EPC Tools allows the user to switch between the explicit and the symbolic algorithm.
The editor of EPC Tools supports multi-line labels for events and functions of an EPC. This should help dealing with realistic EPCs.
There are more analysis functions now. In particular, an EPC can be checked for strong and weak soundness.

For more information, we refer to the references below or to the manual.

Paderborn, January 2006

Nicolas Cuntz (nicolas.cuntz@uni-siegen.de) and
Ekkart Kindler (kindler@upb.de).

Downloads

EPC Tools is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

The latest version of EPC Tools (2.0.3, November 2005) can be downloaded from here.

Installation via the Eclipse Update Site

The Software Engineering Group has installed its own Eclipse Update Site for all its Eclipse PlugIns. You can add this update site to your Eclipse installation via the Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install wizard. During this process, you should add this site as a New Remote Site; you should enter the following URL to the field URL of the new site: http://ag-schaefer.uni-paderborn.de/downloads/eclipse/

After adding and selecting this site, you can directly install EPC Tools from Eclipse via the Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install wizard.

Please note that there is a minor problem with the the update mechanism of Eclipse 3.1: If a plugin-in is missing that is required by the newly installed plug-in, the name of this required plug-in will not be shown properly; instead, the name of the plug-in you want to install is shown (in combination with the version number of the required feature, this results in quite awkward and misleading messages: "EPC Tools (2.1.0) requires feature EPC Tools (3.1.0)"). For the EPC Tools plug-in, you need to install GEF (version 3.1.0) first, which can be obtained from the standard Eclipse Update site at. This is a known bug of Eclipse 3.1, which, hopefully, will be fixed with the next version of Eclipse.

References

Wil van der Aalst, Jörg Desel, Ekkart Kindler: On the semantics of EPCs: A vicious circle.
In: M. Nüttgens, F. Rump (eds.): EPK 2002 - Geschäftsprozessmanagement mit Ereignisgesteuerten Prozessketten, Trier, Germany, November 2002 Proceedings pp. 71-79.

Ekkart Kindler: On the semantics of EPCs: A framework for resolving the vicious circle (Extended abstract).
In: M. Nüttgens, F. Rump (eds.): EPK 2003 - Geschäftsprozessmanagement mit Ereignisgesteuerten Prozessketten, Proceedings, Bamberg, Germany, October 2003, pp. 7-18.

Ekkart Kindler: On the semantics of EPCs: A framework for resolving the vicious circle.
In: J. Desel, B. Pernici, and M. Weske (eds.): Business Process Management, BPM 2004, Second Internation Conference, Potsdam, Germany. Springer, LNCS 3080: 82-97, June 2004.

Nicolas Cuntz: Über die effiziente Simulation von Ereignisgesteuerten Prozessketten. Masters thesis, Universtität Paderborn, Juni 2004. (in German)

Nicolas Cuntz and Ekkart Kindler: On the semantics of EPCs: Efficient calculation and simulation.
In: M. Nüttgens, F. J. Rump(eds.): EPK 2004: Geschäftsprozessmanagement mit Ereignisgesteuerten Prozessketten, Proceedings, Luxembourgh. October 2004, pp. 7-26.

Nicolas Cuntz and Ekkart Kindler: On the semantics of EPCs: Efficient calculation and simulation (Extended Abstract).
In: W.M.P. van der Aalst, B. Benatallah, F. Curbera (eds.): Third International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM), Nancy, France, September 2005. Springer, LNCS 3649, pp.398-403, 2005

Nicolas Cuntz and Ekkart Kindler: On the semantics of EPCs - Efficient calculation and simulation.
Enterpise Modelling and Information Systems Architecture, 1 (1), 14-24, October 2005.

Nicolas Cuntz, Jörn Freiheit, and Ekkart Kindler: On the semantics of EPCs: Faster calculation for EPCs with small state spaces.
In: M. Nüttgens, F. J. Rump (eds.): EPK 2005: Geschäftsprozessmanagement mit Ereignisgesteuerten Prozessketten, Hamburg. Proceedings pp. 7-23, December 2005.

Ekkart Kindler: On the semantics of EPCs: Resolving the vicious circle.
Data & Knowledge Engineering, Special Issue on Business Process Management, 56 (1), 23-40, January 2006.