An Open Platform for Business Process Modeling and (original) (raw)

Towards the Verification of Business Process Modeling

2011

Management of Business Process has come out as a set of technologies aimed at supporting the execution of the business logic by means of modern business best practices [1], which include Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) for workflow execution and monitoring. To attain this, any organization should previously obtain, as result of the Business Process Modelling (BPM), the complete definition of the set of its[5] business processes (BPs), i.e., the set of ‘different ways ’ by which companies conduct its (business) objectives or user goals. Nevertheless, BPM is a “non engineered ” activity up to now, since there’s still a lack of maturity of current methods and languages in BPTM, especially a lack of soundness and semantics richness. No formal definition of any logics exists up until now to describe the set of activities needed to achieve the user goals [2]. Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) [3] has become the “de facto " standard graphical notation for BPM, which descri...

A method for verifiable and validatable business process modeling

2008

We define an extensible semantical framework for business process modeling notations. Since our definition starts from scratch, it helps to faithfully link the understanding of business processes by analysts and operators, on the process design and management side, by IT technologists and programmers, on the implementation side, and by users, on the application side. We illustrate the framework by a high-level operational definition of the semantics of the BPMN standard of OMG.

Modeling and Analysis of Business Processes with Business Rules

Visual business process representation languages such as BPMN are a useful tool for specification of business processes. However, practical verification and execution of Business Process Models is a challenging task. One solution to this problem is integration of business processes with business rules, which provides a flexible runtime environment. This chapter concerns Business Process Models as a visual inference specification method for modularized rule bases. To provide the background for this approach, selected analysis and execution methods for Business Processes, such as BPEL and BPMN tools, are presented. Business Processes can be supported with Business Rules as executable logic. Rule-Based Systems have well-established methods for verification and optimization. This chapter presents selected rule-based solutions, such as Drools and XTT2 - a novel visual rule specification that provides formalized analysis - as well as their integration with BPMN as a visual method for inference specification. The proposed BPMN+XTT2 solution combines flexible business process modeling provided by BPMN with verification and execution features of XTT2.

Verifying Business Processes using

1998

We present an application of the Spin model-checker in Testbed, a framework for business process reengineering. Business processes are described by end-users of Testbed in a graphi-cal language with a causality-based semantics, called Amber. The Amber language contains various constructs describing actions, causality relations, disabling, interaction and hierarchical composition. Data entities are modelled as variables that are handled by the business processes. We present a validation methodology for business processes using model-checking techniques. In this approach, an Amber speciication is automatically translated into a state machine description in Promela, which is the input language of the Spin model-checker. The correctness properties, concerning both the behavioural aspects and the data entities used in the speciication, are checked on the resulting Promela program using Spin. A prototype veriication toolset has been developed and successfully applied to various examples i...

A Logic-Based Method for Business Process Knowledge Base Management1

iasi.cnr.it

In this paper we present the BPAL platform aimed at the management of Business Process Knowledge Bases. It includes a logic-based language for BP modeling and a reasoning mechanism providing support to BP designers in several services. Firstly, the definition of a BP meta-model (MM) consisting of a set of rules that guide the BP designers in their work. Secondly, given a BP, the BPAL platform allows for the automatic verification of the compliance of a given BP w.r.t. the defined MM. Finally, the execution semantics of a BP is given in term of its instances (referred to as traces) to provide two basic services; checking if an execution of a BP has been carried out in accordance with the corresponding definition (process log analysis); simulating possible executions by automatic traces generation. The proposed platform is open since the meta-model can be easily modified to codify different classes of BP, to comply with specific needs of an enterprise.

BProVe: Tool support for business process verification

2017 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2017

This demo introduces BProVe, a tool supporting automated verification of Business Process models. BProVe analysis is based on a formal operational semantics defined for the BPMN 2.0 modelling language, and is provided as a freely accessible service that uses open standard formats as input data. Furthermore a plug-in for the Eclipse platform has been developed making available a tool chain supporting users in modelling and visualising, in a friendly manner, the results of the verification. Finally we have conducted a validation through more than one thousand models, showing the effectiveness of our verification tool in practice.

Compliance checking of execution traces to business rules: an approach based on logic programming

Proceedings of the …, 2008

Complex and flexible business processes are critical not only because they are difficult to handle, but also because they often tend to be less intelligible. Monitoring and verifying complex and flexible processes becomes therefore a fundamental requirement. We propose a framework for performing compliance checking of process execution traces w.r.t. expressive reactive business rules, tailored to the MXML meta-model. Rules are mapped to (extensions of) Logic Programming, to the aim of providing both monitoring and a-posteriori verification capabilities. We show how different rule templates, inspired by the ConDec language, can be easily specified and then customized in the context of a real industrial case study. We finally describe how the proposed language and its underlying a-posteriori reasoning technique have been concretely implemented as a ProM analysis plug-in.

Modelling and verification of BPEL business processes

Fourth Workshop on Model-Based Development of Computer-Based Systems and Third International Workshop on Model-Based Methodologies for Pervasive and Embedded Software (MBD-MOMPES'06), 2006

A business process is a complex web service with functions provided by different web services, which are already existing in web and are dynamically integrated for granting a more complex business task. For this reason, business processes have become more and more diffuse in B2B and B2C domains, so that the importance of their activities asks for a high-level of reliability. Methods and tools for supporting automatic system verification and validation could be useful. Among the techniques of automatic verification, we choose Model Checking method, because we applied it efficiently for verification of a single web service and in this paper we extend the area of application also in business processes. Descriptions of the behavior of a business process are coded using a standard language, BPEL4WS, that has broadly spread because it is able to describe a business process as both an executable process and an abstract process. Therefore, we model a BPEL description of a generic business process with a formal model and we formalize correctness properties about the reliability of the business process design. Also, we build a framework that performs automatic verification of formal models of business processes through NuSMV model checker. If there is a violation of correctness specifications, NuSMV provides counter-examples, so we can locate errors and effect right changes for correcting business process design.

A rigorous methodology for specification and verification of business processes

Formal Aspects of Computing, 2009

Both specification and verification of business processes are gaining more and more attention in the field. Most of the existing works in the last years are dealing with important, yet very specialized, issues. Among these, we can enumerate compensation constructs to cope with exceptions generated by long running business transactions, fully programmable fault and compensation handling mechanism, web service area, scope-based compensation and shared-labels for synchronization, and so on. The main purpose of this paper is to present a semi-automatized framework to describe and analyse business processes. Business analysts can now use a simple specification language (e.g., BPMN [Obj06]) to describe any type of activity in a company, in a concurrent and modular fashion. The associated programs (e.g., BPDs [Obj06]) have to be executed in an appropriate language (e.g., BPEL4WS [ACD+03]). Much more, they have to be confirmed to be sound, via some prescribed (a priori) conditions. We suggest how all the issues can be embedded in a unifying computer tool. We link our work with similar approaches and we justify our particular choices (besides BPMN and BPD): the TLA+ language for expressing the imposed behavioural conditions and Petri Nets ([EB87], [EB88]) to describe an intermediate semantics. In fact, we want to manage in an appropriate way the general relationship diagram (Fig. 1). Examples and case studies are provided. General relationship diagram