Conformance checking in UML artifact-centric business process models

Business artifacts have appeared as a new paradigm to capture the information required for the complete execution and reasoning of a business process. Likewise, conformance checking is gaining popularity as a crucial technique that enables evaluating whether recorded executions of a process match its corresponding model. In this paper, conformance checking techniques are incorporated into a general framework to specify business artifacts. By relying on the expressive power of an artifact-centric specification, BAUML, which combines UML state and activity diagrams (among others), the problem of conformance checking can be mapped into the Petri net formalism and its results be explained in terms of the original artifact-centric specification. In contrast to most existing approaches, ours incorporates data constraints into the Petri nets, thus achieving conformance results which are more precise. We have also implemented a plug-in, within the ProM framework, which is able to translate a BAUML into a Petri net to perform conformance checking. This shows the feasibility of our approach.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Advancements and Challenges in Object-Centric Process Mining: A Systematic Literature Review

Recent years have seen the emergence of object-centric process mining techniques. Born as a response to the limitations of traditional process mining in analyzing event data from prevalent information systems like CRM and ERP, these techniques aim to tackle the deficiency, convergence, and divergence issues seen in traditional event logs. Despite the promise, the adoption in real-world process mining analyses remains limited. This paper embarks on a comprehensive literature review of object-centric process mining, providing insights into the current status of the discipline and its historical trajectory

Reasoning on the usage control security policies over data artifact business process models

The inclusion of security aspects in organizations is a crucial aspect to ensure compliance with both internal and external regulations. Business process models are a well-known mechanism to describe and automate the activities of the organizations, which should include security policies to ensure the correct performance of the daily activities. Frequently, these security policies involve complex data which cannot be represented using the standard Business Process Model Notation (BPMN). In this paper, we propose the enrichment of the BPMN with a UML class diagram to describe the data model, that is also combined with security policies defined using the UCONABC framework annotated within the business process model. The integration of the business process model, the data model, and the security policies provides a context where more complex reasoning can be applied about the satisfiability of the security policies in accordance with the business process and data models. To do so, wetransform the original models, including security policies, into the BAUML framework (an artifact-centric approach to business process modelling). Once this is done, it is possible to ensure that there are no inherent errors in the model (verification) and that it fulfils the business requirements (validation), thus ensuring that the business process and the security policies are compatible and that they are aligned with the business security requirements.This work has been supported by Project PID2020-112540RB-C44 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033, Project TIN2017-87610-R funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER “Una manera de hacer Europa”, Project 2017-SGR-1749 by the Generalitat de Catalunya, Projects COPERNICA (P20 01224) and METAMORFOSIS by the Junta de Andalucía.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Artifact Lifecycle Discovery

Artifact-centric modeling is a promising approach for modeling business processes based on the so-called business artifacts - key entities driving the company's operations and whose lifecycles define the overall business process. While artifact-centric modeling shows significant advantages, the overwhelming majority of existing process mining methods cannot be applied (directly) as they are tailored to discover monolithic process models. This paper addresses the problem by proposing a chain of methods that can be applied to discover artifact lifecycle models in Guard-Stage-Milestone notation. We decompose the problem in such a way that a wide range of existing (non-artifact-centric) process discovery and analysis methods can be reused in a flexible manner. The methods presented in this paper are implemented as software plug-ins for ProM, a generic open-source framework and architecture for implementing process mining tools

Discovering mapping between artifact-centric business process models and execution logs

Klassikaliselt on kirjeldatud töövoogusi protsessidele orienteeritud kujul, kus keskendutakse tervele töövoole ja tegevustele selles. Hiljuti on esile kerkinud uudne, artefakti keskne modelleerimine, kus on oluliseks just äriobjektid ning nende vahelised seosed. Artefakti põhised meetodid nõuavad ka muudatusi protsessianalüüsi tehnikates. Üks võimalik protsesside analüüsi meetod on käivituslogide vastavuse kontrollimine protsessi mudeliga, mille abil saab tuvastada kas süsteem käitub nii nagu planeeritud. Mudeli ja logide vastavuse kontrollimiseks on vaja teada, millised sündmused logides vastavad millistele tegevustele mudelis. Töö eemärgiks on automaatselt tuvastada seosed artefakti põhiste protsessimudelites olevate tegevuste ja töövoosüsteemi logides olevate sündmuste vahel. Selline seose tuvastamine pole triviaalne, kuna võib esineda, et sündmuste nimed logides ja tegevuste nimed mudelis ei ole vastavuses. Näiteks ei jälgita samasid standardeid nimetamisel. Samuti on vaja seoste automaatne tuletamine, kui on teada, et logide ja mudeli vahel on mittesobivused ning kõiki sündmuseid ja tegevusi ei saagi vastavusse viia. Automaatne tuvastamine aitab lihtsustada kasutaja tööd. Lahenduseks pakutud meetod kasutab sisendina Procleti põhist mudelit ja käivituslogi süsteemist. Et leida seos mudeli ja logide vahel, viiakse mõlemad graafi kujule. Seosed leitakse iga artefakti kohta eraldi ning ei kasutata infot nende omavahelise suhtluse kohta. Iga artefakti kohta eraldatakse nende Petri võrk ning koostatakse käitumisrelatsioonid, mis väljendavad kuidas on tegevused antud artefaktis omavahel seotud. Sellest koostatakse graaf, mille tippudeks saavad tegevused ning kaarteks tippude vahel käitumisseosed nende vahel. Analoogselt koostatakse graaf iga logis esinenud olemi kohta. Kasutaja poolt sisestatud olemite ja artefaktide tüüpide vahelise seoste abil leitakse iga vastava olemi ja artefakti isendi tegevuste ja sündmuste vahelised seosed. Seoste leidmine taandub kahe graafi vaheliste tippude kujutuse leidmisele. Seoste leidmiseks esmalt arvutatakse sarnasused tegevuste nimede vahel ning selle põhjal leitakse kujutus, mis minimiseeriks teisenduskaugust graafide vahel antud kujutuse põhjal. Kujutuse leimiseks kasutatakse ahnet algoritmi. Praktilise eksperimendina testiti meetodit erinevate mudelite ja logide kombinatsioonidel. Tulemused näitavad, et meetod on võimeline seoseid leidma, kuid tulemuste kvaliteet sõltub palju tegevuste ja sündmuste nimede sarnasusest ja vähem struktuurilisest sarnasustest

Using the guard-stage-milestone notation for monitoring BPMN-based processes

Business processes are usually designed by means of imperative languages to model the acceptable execution of the activities performed within a system or an organization. At the same time, declarative languages are better suited to check the conformance of the states and transitions of the modeled process with respect to its actual execution. To avoid defining models twice from scratch to cope with both the process enactment and its monitoring, this paper proposes an approach for translating BPMN process models to E-GSM ones: an extension of the Guard-Stage-Milestone artifact-centric notation. The paper also shows how a monitoring engine based on E-GSM specifications can detect anomalies during the execution of the process and classify them according to different levels of severity, that is, with respect to the impact on the outcome of the process

Process conformance checking by relaxing data dependencies

Given the events modeled by a business process, it may happen in the presence of alternative execution paths that the data required by a certain event determines somehow what event is executed next. Then, the process can be modeled by using an approximate functional dependency between the data required by both events. We apply this approach in the context of conformance checking: given a business process model with a functional dependency (FD) that no longer corresponds to the observed reality, we propose corrections to the FD to make it exact or at least to improve its confidence and produce a more accurate model.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Ensuring the semantic correctness of a BAUML artifact-centric BPM

Context: Using models to represent business processes provides several advantages, such as facilitating the communication between the stakeholders or being able to check the correctness of the processes before their implementation. In contrast to traditional process modeling approaches, the artifact-centric approach treats data as a key element of the process, also considering the tasks or activities that are performed in it. Objective: This paper presents a way to verify and validate the semantic correctness of an artifact-centric business process model defined using a combination of UML and OCL models - a BAUML model. Method: We achieve our goal by presenting several algorithms that encode the initial models into first-order logic, which then allows to use an existing satisfiability checking tool to determine their correctness. Results: An approach to verify and validate an artifact-centric BPM specified in BAUML, which uses a combination of UML and OCL models. To do this, we provide a method to translate all BAUML components into a set of logic formulas. The result of this translation ensures that the only changes allowed are those specified in the model, and that those changes are taking place according the order established by the model. Having obtained this logic representation, these models can be validated by any existing reasoning method able to deal with negation of derived predicates. Moreover, we show how to automatically generate the relevant tests to validate the models. We also show the feasibility of our approach by implementing a prototype tool and applying it to a running example. Conclusion: It is feasible to ensure the semantic correctness of an artifact-centric business process model in practice.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Verifiable UML Artifact-Centric Business Process Models (Extended Version)

Artifact-centric business process models have gained increasing momentum recently due to their ability to combine structural (i.e., data related) with dynamical (i.e., process related) aspects. In particular, two main lines of research have been pursued so far: one tailored to business artefact modeling languages and methodologies, the other focused on the foundations for their formal verification. In this paper, we merge these two lines of research, by showing how recent theoretical decidability results for verification can be fruitfully transferred to a concrete UML-based modeling methodology. In particular, we identify additional steps in the methodology that, in significant cases, guarantee the possibility of verifying the resulting models against rich first-order temporal properties. Notably, our results can be seamlessly transferred to different languages for the specification of the artifact lifecycles.Comment: Extended version of "Verifiable UML Artifact-Centric Business Process Models" - to appear in the Proceedings of CIKM 201