Verification and Compliance in Collaborative Processes

Evidently, COVID-19 has changed our lives and is likely to make a lasting impact on our economic development and our industry and services. With the ongoing process of digital transformation in industry and services, Collaborative Networks (CNs) is required to be more efficient, productive, flexible, resilient and sustainable according to change of situations and related rules applied afterwards. Although the CN area is relatively young, it requires the previous research to be extended, i.e. business process management from dealing with processes within a single organization into processes across different organizations. In this paper, we review current business process verification and compliance research. Different tools approaches and limitations of them are compared. The further research issues and potential solutions of business process verification and compliance check are discussed in the context of CNs

A higher-order transformation approach to the formalization and analysis of BPMN using graph transformation systems

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a widely used standard notation for defining intra- and inter-organizational workflows. However, the informal description of the BPMN execution semantics leads to different interpretations of BPMN elements and difficulties in checking behavioral properties. In this article, we propose a formalization of the execution semantics of BPMN that, compared to existing approaches, covers more BPMN elements while also facilitating property checking. Our approach is based on a higher-order transformation from BPMN models to graph transformation systems. To show the capabilities of our approach, we implemented it as an open-source web-based tool

Enabling Multi-Perspective Business Process Compliance

A particular challenge for any enterprise is to ensure that its business processes conform with compliance rules, i.e., semantic constraints on the multiple perspectives of the business processes. Compliance rules stem, for example, from legal regulations, corporate best practices, domain-specific guidelines, and industrial standards. In general, compliance rules are multi-perspective, i.e., they not only restrict the process behavior (i.e. control flow), but may refer to other process perspectives (e.g. time, data, and resources) and the interactions (i.e. message exchanges) of a business process with other processes as well. The aim of this thesis is to improve the specification and verification of multi-perspective process compliance based on three contributions: 1. The extended Compliance Rule Graph (eCRG) language, which enables the visual modeling of multi-perspective compliance rules. Besides control flow, the latter may refer to the time, data, resource, and interaction perspectives of a business process. 2. A framework for multi-perspective monitoring of the compliance of running processes with a given set of eCRG compliance rules. 3. Techniques for verifying business process compliance with respect to the interaction perspective. In particular, we consider compliance verification for cross-organizational business processes, for which solely incomplete process knowledge is available. All contributions were thoroughly evaluated through proof-of-concept prototypes, case studies, empirical studies, and systematic comparisons with related works

A Study on the Usage of the BPMN Notation for Designing Process Collaboration, Choreography, and Conversation Models

Being widely accepted by industries and academia, Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is the de facto standard for business process modeling. However, the large number of notation elements it introduces makes its use quite complex. This work investigates the usage of the BPMN notation by analyzing 54,500 models harvested from seven online collections. The study considers different model types introduced by the standard, such as process collaboration, choreography, and conversation. The analyses focus on the syntactic dimension of BPMN, investigating the usage of BPMN elements and their combinations. Syntactic violations of the standard, and of good modeling practices, are also investigated as well as possible relations with BPMN elements and modeling tools. The results of this study can guide further activities of educators, practitioners, researchers, and standardization bodies

Quality of process modeling using BPMN: a model-driven approach

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia InformáticaContext: The BPMN 2.0 specification contains the rules regarding the correct usage of the language’s constructs. Practitioners have also proposed best-practices for producing better BPMN models. However, those rules are expressed in natural language, yielding sometimes ambiguous interpretation, and therefore, flaws in produced BPMN models. Objective: Ensuring the correctness of BPMN models is critical for the automation of processes. Hence, errors in the BPMN models specification should be detected and corrected at design time, since faults detected at latter stages of processes’ development can be more costly and hard to correct. So, we need to assess the quality of BPMN models in a rigorous and systematic way. Method: We follow a model-driven approach for formalization and empirical validation of BPMN well-formedness rules and BPMN measures for enhancing the quality of BPMN models. Results: The rule mining of BPMN specification, as well as recently published BPMN works, allowed the gathering of more than a hundred of BPMN well-formedness and best-practices rules. Furthermore, we derived a set of BPMN measures aiming to provide information to process modelers regarding the correctness of BPMN models. Both BPMN rules, as well as BPMN measures were empirically validated through samples of BPMN models. Limitations: This work does not cover control-flow formal properties in BPMN models, since they were extensively discussed in other process modeling research works. Conclusion: We intend to contribute for improving BPMN modeling tools, through the formalization of well-formedness rules and BPMN measures to be incorporated in those tools, in order to enhance the quality of process modeling outcomes

A compensating transaction example in twelve notations

The scenario of business computer systems changed with the advent of cross-entity computer interactions: computer systems no longer had the limited role of storing and processing data, but became themselves the players which actuated real-life actions. These advancements rendered the traditional transaction mechanism insufficient to deal with these new complexities of longer multi-party transactions. The concept of compensations has long been suggested as a solution, providing the possibility of executing “counter”-actions which semantically undo previously completed actions in case a transaction fails. There are numerous design options related to compensations particularly when deciding the strategy of ordering compensating actions. Along the years, various models which include compensations have emerged, each tackling in its own way these options. In this work, we review a number of notations which handle compensations by going through their syntax and semantics — highlighting the distinguishing features — and encoding a typical compensating transaction example in terms of each of these notations.peer-reviewe

Exploiting Process Algebras and BPM Techniques for Guaranteeing Success of Distributed Activities

The communications and collaborations among activities, pro- cesses, or systems, in general, are the base of complex sys- tems defined as distributed systems. Given the increasing complexity of their structure, interactions, and functionali- ties, many research areas are interested in providing mod- elling techniques and verification capabilities to guarantee their correctness and satisfaction of properties. In particular, the formal methods community provides robust verification techniques to prove system properties. However, most ap- proaches rely on manually designed formal models, making the analysis process challenging because it requires an expert in the field. On the other hand, the BPM community pro- vides a widely used graphical notation (i.e., BPMN) to design internal behaviour and interactions of complex distributed systems that can be enhanced with additional features (e.g., privacy technologies). Furthermore, BPM uses process min- ing techniques to automatically discover these models from events observation. However, verifying properties and ex- pected behaviour, especially in collaborations, still needs a solid methodology. This thesis aims at exploiting the features of the formal meth- ods and BPM communities to provide approaches that en- able formal verification over distributed systems. In this con- text, we propose two approaches. The modelling-based ap- proach starts from BPMN models and produces process al- gebra specifications to enable formal verification of system properties, including privacy-related ones. The process mining- based approach starts from logs observations to automati- xv cally generate process algebra specifications to enable veri- fication capabilities

Preservation process modelling (including a review of semantic process modelling and workflow languages)

This report describes in a formalised way a comprehensive set of processes for digital preservation. These processes are drawn from a series of relevant projects and standards from the preservation community, including OAIS, TRAC, PLANETS and others. The result is intended to be used as a generic baseline that those interested in audiovisual preservation can refer to, extract and customise processes in order to fit with their specific AV preservation needs