DB-Nets: on The Marriage of Colored Petri Nets and Relational Databases

The integrated management of business processes and mas- ter data is being increasingly considered as a fundamental problem, by both the academia and the industry. In this position paper, we focus on the foundations of the problem, arguing that contemporary approaches struggle to find a suitable equilibrium between data- and process-related aspects. We then propose db-nets, a new formal model that balances such two pillars through the marriage of colored Petri nets and relational databases. We invite the research community to build on this model, discussing its potential in modeling, formal verification, and simulation.