Semantics and Analysis of DMN Decision Tables

Proc. of the 14th Int. Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2016). Volume 9850 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 2016. Best paper award.

The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) is a standard notation to capture decision logic in business applications in general and business processes in particular. A central construct in DMN is that of a decision table. The increasing use of DMN decision tables to capture critical business knowledge raises the need to support analysis tasks on these tables such as correctness and completeness checking. This paper provides a formal semantics for DMN tables, a formal definition of key analysis tasks and scalable algorithms to tackle two such tasks, i.e., detection of overlapping rules and of missing rules. The algorithms are based on a geometric interpretation of decision tables that can be used to support other analysis tasks by tapping into geometric algorithms. The algorithms have been implemented in an open-source DMN editor and tested on large decision tables derived from a credit lending dataset.

@inproceedings{BPM-2016,
   title = "Semantics and Analysis of DMN Decision Tables",
   year = "2016",
   author = "Diego Calvanese and Marlon Dumas and Ülari Laurson and
Fabrizio M. Maggi and Marco Montali and Irene Teinemaa",
   booktitle = "Proc. of the 14th Int. Conference on Business Process
Management (BPM 2016)",
   pages = "217--233",
   volume = "9850",
   publisher = "Springer",
   series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science",
   doi = "10.1007/978-3-319-45348-4_13",
   note = "Best paper award",
}