Efficient conditional compliance checking of business process models

When checking compliance of business processes against a set of business rules or regulations, the ability to handle and verify conditions in both the model and the rules is essential. Existing design-time verification approaches, however, either completely lack support for the verification of conditions or propose costly verification methods that also consider the full data perspective. This paper proposes a novel light-weight verification method, which is preferable over expensive approaches that include the data perspective when considering structural properties of a business process model. This novel approach generates partial models that capture only relevant execution states to the conditions under investigation. The resulting model can be verified using existing model checking techniques. The computation of such partial models fully abstracts conditions from the full models and specifications, thus avoiding the analysis of the full data perspective. The proposed method is complete with respect to the analyzed execution paths, while significantly reducing the state space complexity by pruning unreachable states given the conditions under investigation. This approach offers the ability to check if a process is compliant with rules and regulations on a much more fine-grained level, and it enables a more precise formulation of the conditions that should and should not hold in the processes. The approach is particularly useful in dynamic environments where processes are constantly changing and efficient conditional compliance checking is a necessity. The approach – implemented in Java and publicly available – is evaluated in terms of performance and practicability, and tested over both synthetic datasets and a real-life case from the Australian telecommunications sector

Business Process Variability:a study into process management and verification

Business process management (BPM) beheert en optimaliseert bedrijfsprocessen met het doel om productiviteit en bedrijfsprestaties te verhogen. BPM is een snel evoluerend veld door nieuw opkomende vereisten vanuit flexibele bedrijfstakken waar bedrijfsprocessen steeds minder star behoren te zijn. Waar BPM in het verleden specifieke rigide en repetitieve werkeenheden ondersteunde voor de lokale gebruiker, wordt tegenwoordig vereist dat het losgekoppelde processen ondersteunt in cloud configuraties, te midden van vele gebruikers met elk vele verschillende eisen.Zolang het BPM veld een stijgend aantal snel evoluerende bedrijfsprocessen in flexibele bedrijfstakken ondersteunt, moet de evolutie van elk bedrijfsproces aanhoudend correct gedrag vertonen en tevens voldoen aan de opgelegde wet- en regelgeving en interne bedrijfsregels. Om het aanhoudend correct gedrag te ondersteunen van snel evoluerende BP, of de definitie van een breed aantal soortgelijke bedrijfsprocessen, evalueren we de toepassing van formele verificatietechnieken als mogelijke oplossing voor analyse van het juiste gedrag en wettelijk conforme ontwerp van bedrijfsprocessen binnen mogelijke proces families, welke plaatsvindt voorafgaand aan de uitvoering van dat bedrijfsproces.Een innovatieve benadering voor verificatie tijdens de ontwerpfase wordt gepresenteerd. De benadering ondersteunt de verschillende vertakkende en samenvoegende constructies zoals toegestaan in bedrijfsprocesmodellen en hun service composities. Evaluaties met betrekking tot expressiviteit bewijzen dat, anders dan doorgaans toegepaste transitiesystemen, het voorgestelde model bekende bedrijfsprocespatronen juist vastlegt. Verder behoudt het model informatie over de aanwezigheid van parallelle activiteiten en de lokale volgende activiteit: een eigenschap uniek aan de voorgestelde aanpak.Business Process Management (BPM) manages and optimizes business processes with the intent to increase productivity and performance. BPM is a rapidly evolving field due to new requirements emerging at agile branches of business where business processes are required to be less and less rigid. Where BPM supported local user-specific rigid and repetitive units of work in the past, these days it is required to support loosely-coupled processes in cloud configurations among many users with each many different requirements.As the field of BPM continues to manage an increasing number of rapidly evolving business processes in agile environments, the evolution of each business process must continue to always behave in a correct manner and remain compliant with the laws, regulations, and internal business requirements imposed upon it. To manage the correct behavior of quickly evolving business processes, or the definition of a wide variety of similar business processes, we evaluate the application of formal verification techniques as a possible solution for the pre-runtime analysis of the correct behavior and compliant design of business processes within possible process families. A novel approach allowing pre-runtime verification that supports the different branching and merging constructs allowed by business process models and their service compositions is presented. Evaluations on expressive power demonstrate that, other than the generally employed transition systems, the proposed model correctly captures well-known business process patterns. Furthermore, it maintains information on parallel occurrences of activities and the local next activity occurrence: an ability which is unique to the presented approach