Checking Soundness of Business Processes Compositionally Using Symbolic Observation Graphs

Abstract. The Symbolic Observation Graph (SOG) associated with a labelled transition system and a subset of its labels is an efficient BDDbased abstraction representing the behavior of a system. The goal of this paper is to compose SOGs such that the resulting SOG is still small but represents the behavior of the composed business process in an appropriate way. In particular, we would like to deduce the properties of a composed business process by analysing the composition of the SOGs associated with its components. This question was already answered for the deadlock-freeness property in previous work. In this paper, we extend this result to other generic properties: the so-called soundness properties. These properties guarantee the absence of livelocks, deadlocks and other anomalies that can be formulated without domain knowledge. Thus, we show how the SOG can be adapted and used so that the verification of several variants of the soundness property can be performed modularly

Reusing artifact-centric business process models : a behavioral consistent specialization approach

Process reuse is one of the important research areas that address efficiency issues in business process modeling. Similar to software reuse, business processes should be able to be componentized and specialized in order to enable flexible process expansion and customization. Current activity/control-flow centric workflow modeling approaches face difficulty in supporting highly flexible process reuse, limited by their procedural nature. In comparison, the emerging artifact-centric workflow modeling approach well fits into these reuse requirements. Beyond the classic class level reuse in existing object-oriented approaches, process reuse faces the challenge of handling synchronization dependencies among artifact lifecycles as parts of a business process. In this article, we propose a theoretical framework for business process specialization that comprises an artifact-centric business process model, a set of methods to design and construct a specialized business process model from a base model, and a set of behavioral consistency criteria to help check the consistency between the two process models. © 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature

Symbolic abstraction and deadlock-freeness verification of inter-enterprise processes

International audienceThe design of complex inter-enterprise business processes (IEBP) is generally performed in a modular way. Each process is designed separately and then the whole IEBP is obtained by omposition. Even if such a modular approach is intuitive and facilitates the design problem, it poses the problem that correct behavior of each business process of the IEBP taken alone does not guarantee a correct behavior of the composed IEBP (i.e.\ properties are not preserved by composition). Proving correctness of the (unknown) composed process is strongly related to the model checking problem of a system model. Among others, the symbolic observation graph based approach has proven to be very helpful for efficient model checking in general. Since it is heavily based on abstraction techniques and thus hides detailed information about system components that are not relevant for the correctness decision, it is promising to transfer this concept to the problem rised in this paper: How can the symbolic observation graph technique be adapted and employed for process composition? Answering this question is the aim of this paper

Symbolic abstraction and deadlock freeness verification of inter-enterprise processes

International audienceWeb services can be viewed as processes of an enterprise which are used by (processes of) other enterprises. So, when offering a web service, it is necessary to publish sufficient information about the interface of the web service process. On the other hand, details of the internal behaviour of a web service should be hidden. So the design of complex inter-enterprise business processes(IEBP) employing web services is generally performed in a modular way. Each service is designed separately from the others and then the whole IEBP is obtained by composition. Even if such a modular approach is intuitive and facilitates the design problem, it poses the problem that correct behavior of each service of the IEBP taken alone does not guarantee a correct behavior of the composed IEBP (i.e. properties are not preserved by composition). In this paper, we address this problem. First, we propose to use a new variant of symbolic observation graphs as an abstraction of any service of the IEBP (only cooperative activities are visible). Local deadlock freeness can be checked efficiently on such an abstraction using symbolic algorithms. Second, we propose to synchronize the symbolic observation graphs associated with the different processes of the IEBP and supply an efficient algorithm for the verification of deadlock freeness of the synchronized product. The deadlock freeness of such a product guarantees a correct possible cooperation between the underlying processes (i.e. a deadlock free cooperation)