A Practical Data-Flow Verification Scheme for Business Processes

Data in business processes is becoming more and more important. Current standards for process-modeling languages like BPMN 2.0 which include the data flow reflect this. Ensuring the correctness of the data flow in processes is challenging. Model checking, i. e., verifying properties of process models, is a well-known technique to this end. An important part of model checking is the construction of the state space of the model. State-space explosion however typically is in the way of an effective verification. We study how to overcome this problem in our context by means of reduction. More specifically, we propose a reduction on the level of the process model. To our knowledge, this is new for the data-flow analysis of processes. To accomplish this, we specify regions relevant for the verification of properties describing the data flow. Our evaluation shows that our approach works well on real process models

Verifying Workflow Models with Data Values - a Case Study of SMR Spectrum Auctions

Industry takes a great interest in verification techniques to improve the reliability of process designs. Providing reliable design in application domains like spectrum auctions is crucial. Spectrum auction revenue is considered as one of the principal sources for governmental income. Hence, analyzing the auction design before applying it can ensure absence of undesirable results of an auction. Those results might even be bad, if they occur with a probability of just higher than zero. Current verification approaches are mainly devoted to verify control ows only, although data values play a significant role in real life applications. Thus, these approaches are not sufficient to support data-centered work ows as spectrum auctions. We address this issue by providing a new data-centered verification approach to analyze Simultaneous Multi-Round (SMR) auction design in BPMN format. We show how to enhance a BPMN model by including important information, namely data values used in the work ow, which the standard BPMN 2.0 does not support. An example of a data value in a SMR auction is the "auctioneer\u27s revenue". To enable the verification of data-centered properties, we have developed a transformation of a data-value enhanced BPMN model to Petri Nets respecting the semantics of certain data value usages. For that, we support dynamic and correlated data values. By employing a model checker and defining data-centered properties in CTL formula, we verify SMR auction models to find undesirable executions for auctioneers. For example, we can precisely detect the worst values of three important measures in auctions: efficiency, revenue, and bidder\u27s profit. With it, we can not only find the undesirable outcomes, but also provide a counter-example to help an auctioneer to improve the auction design

Automatic Synthesis and Verification of Industrial Commissioning Processes

The topic of this doctoral dissertation is the verification and synthesis of processes, i.e., work-flows. Verification is the check if a given process model fulfills all necessary properties. Synthesis is the automatic generation of a process model from a set of properties. The running example of the thesis and the use case for the evaluation is the commissioning of vehicles in the automobile production