Formal Semantics and Implementation of BPMN 2.0 Inclusive Gateways

The authors present the first direct formalization of the semantics of inclusive gateways as described in the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0 Beta 1 specification. The formal semantics is given for a minimal subset of BPMN 2.0 containing just the inclusive and exclusive gateways and the start and stop events. By focusing on this subset they achieve a simple graph model that highlights the particular non-local features of the inclusive gateway semantics. They sketch two ways of implementing the semantics using algorithms based on incrementally updated data structures and also discuss distributed communication-based implementations of the two algorithms.