A System for Deduction-based Formal Verification of Workflow-oriented Software Models

The work concerns formal verification of workflow-oriented software models using deductive approach. The formal correctness of a model's behaviour is considered. Manually building logical specifications, which are considered as a set of temporal logic formulas, seems to be the significant obstacle for an inexperienced user when applying the deductive approach. A system, and its architecture, for the deduction-based verification of workflow-oriented models is proposed. The process of inference is based on the semantic tableaux method which has some advantages when compared to traditional deduction strategies. The algorithm for an automatic generation of logical specifications is proposed. The generation procedure is based on the predefined workflow patterns for BPMN, which is a standard and dominant notation for the modeling of business processes. The main idea for the approach is to consider patterns, defined in terms of temporal logic,as a kind of (logical) primitives which enable the transformation of models to temporal logic formulas constituting a logical specification. Automation of the generation process is crucial for bridging the gap between intuitiveness of the deductive reasoning and the difficulty of its practical application in the case when logical specifications are built manually. This approach has gone some way towards supporting, hopefully enhancing our understanding of, the deduction-based formal verification of workflow-oriented models.Comment: International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Verification of Structured Processes: A Method Based on an Unsoundness Profile

The verification of business processes has been widely studied in the last two decades achieving significant results. Despite this, existing verification techniques based on state space exploration suffer, for large processes, the state space explosion problem. New techniques improved verification performance by structuring processes as trees. However, they do not support complex constructs for advanced synchronization and exception management. To cope with this issue we propose the definition of an unsoundness profile of a given process language, which specifies all possible combinations of control flow constructs that can lead to errors in the behavior of structured processes defined with such a language. In addition, we introduce the sequential and hierarchical soundness properties, which make use of this profile to determine soundness of a structured process with complex constructs in polynomial time. As an example, we defined an unsoundness profile for a subset of the BPMN language and verified the behavior of a BPMN process model.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Using Concurrent Task Trees for Stakeholder-centered Modeling and Visualization of Business Processes

The different stakeholders in Business Process Management have to deal with various process models in order to understand the business processes being relevant for them. Especially inexperienced stakeholders often have difficulties in comprehending large and complex process models. In this paper a stakeholder-centered approach for modeling, changing and visualizing business processes is introduced. It is based on the Concurrent Task Tree (CTT), which constitutes a task modeling language widely applied in the field of end-user development. In particular, CTT considers stakeholder needs in modeling the behaviour of user interfaces. In the context of our work we apply CTT for modeling, changing and visualizing business processes. To evaluate whether CTT is appropriate for stakeholder-centered process modeling we compare it with imperative process modeling, and introduce a mapping between CTT process models and imperative process models expressed in terms of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). Finally, we provide an advanced stakeholder-centered visualization concept based on CTT

Web Services-Enhanced Agile Modeling and Integrating Business Processes

In a global business context with continuous changes, the enterprises have to enhance their operational efficiency, to react more quickly, to ensure the flexibility of their business processes, and to build new collaboration pathways with external partners. To achieve this goal, they must use e-business methods, mechanisms and techniques while capitalizing on the potential of new information and communication technologies. In this context, we propose a standards, model and Web services-based approach for modeling and integrating agile enterprise business processes. The purpose is to benefit from Web services characteristics to enhance the processes design and realize their dynamic integration. The choice of focusing on Web services is essentially justified by their broad adoption by enterprises as well as their capability to warranty interoperability between both intra and inter-enterprises systems. Thereby, we propose in this chapter a metamodel for describing business processes, and discuss their dynamic integration by addressing the Web services discovery issue. On the one hand, the proposed metamodel is in line with the W3C Web services standards, namely, WSDL, SAWSDL and WS-Policy. It considers the use of BPMN standard to describe the behavioral aspect of business processes and completes their design using UML diagrams describing their functional, non-functional and semantic aspects. On other hand, our approach for integrating processes is in line with BPEL standard recommended to orchestrate Web services. To realize executable business processes, this approach recommends the use of semantic matching and selection mechanisms in order to produce agile systems.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures, Book chapte

Distributed Enforcement of Service Choreographies

Modern service-oriented systems are often built by reusing, and composing together, existing services distributed over the Internet. Service choreography is a possible form of service composition whose goal is to specify the interactions among participant services from a global perspective. In this paper, we formalize a method for the distributed and automated enforcement of service choreographies, and prove its correctness with respect to the realization of the specified choreography. The formalized method is implemented as part of a model-based tool chain released to support the development of choreography-based systems within the EU CHOReOS project. We illustrate our method at work on a distributed social proximity network scenario.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2014, arXiv:1502.0315

Using BPMN to model Internet of Things behavior within business process

Whereas, traditionally, business processes use the Internet of Things (IoTs) as a distributed source of information, the increase of computational capabilities of IoT devices provides them with the means to also execute parts of the business logic, reducing the amount of exchanged data and central processing. Current approaches based on Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) already support modelers to define both business processes and IoT devices behavior at the same level of abstraction. However, they are not restricted to standard BPMN elements and they generate IoT device specific low-level code. The work we present in this paper exclusivelly uses standard BPMN to define central as well as IoT behavior of business processes. In addition, the BPMN that defines the IoT behavior is translated to a neutral-platform programming code. The deployment and execution environments use Web services to support the communication between the process execution engine and IoT devices