BProVe: A formal verification framework for business process models

Business Process Modelling has acquired increasing relevance in software development. Available notations, such as BPMN, permit to describe activities of complex organisations. On the one hand, this shortens the communication gap between domain experts and IT specialists. On the other hand, this permits to clarify the characteristics of software systems introduced to provide automatic support for such activities. Nevertheless, the lack of formal semantics hinders the automatic verification of relevant properties. This paper presents a novel verification framework for BPMN 2.0, called BProVe. It is based on an operational semantics, implemented using MAUDE, devised to make the verification general and effective. A complete tool chain, based on the Eclipse modelling environment, allows for rigorous modelling and analysis of Business Processes. The approach has been validated using more than one thousand models available on a publicly accessible repository. Besides showing the performance of BProVe, this validation demonstrates its practical benefits in identifying correctness issues in real models

Formal approaches to modelling and verifying resource-bounded agents-state of the art and future prospects

This paper reviews formal approaches to modelling and verifying resource-bounded agents focusing on state of the Art and future prospects

Model checking ontology-driven reasoning agents using strategy and abstraction

We present a framework for the modelling, specification and verification of ontology-driven multi-agent rule-based systems (MASs). We assume that each agent executes in a separate process and that they communicate via message passing. The proposed approach makes use of abstract specifications to model the behaviour of some of the agents in the system, and exploits information about the reasoning strategy adopted by the agents. Abstract specifications are given as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas which describe the external behaviour of the agents, allowing their temporal behaviour to be compactly modelled. Both abstraction and strategy have been combined in an automated model checking encoding tool Tovrba for rule-based multi-agent systems which allows the system designer to specify information about agents' interaction, behaviour, and execution strategy at different levels of abstraction. The Tovrba tool generates an encoding of the system for the Maude LTL model checker, allowing properties of the system to be verified

BProVe: Tool support for business process verification

This demo introduces BProVe, a tool supporting automated verification of Business Process models. BProVe analysis is based on a formal operational semantics defined for the BPMN 2.0 modelling language, and is provided as a freely accessible service that uses open standard formats as input data. Furthermore a plug-in for the Eclipse platform has been developed making available a tool chain supporting users in modelling and visualising, in a friendly manner, the results of the verification. Finally we have conducted a validation through more than one thousand models, showing the effectiveness of our verification tool in practice

A Rewriting-Based Model Checker for the Linear Temporal Logic of Rewriting

AbstractThis paper presents a model checker for LTLR, a subset of the temporal logic of rewriting TLR* extending linear temporal logic with spatial action patterns. Both LTLR and TLR* are very expressive logics generalizing well-known state-based and action-based logics. Furthermore, the semantics of TLR* is given in terms of rewrite theories, so that the concurrent systems on which the LTLR properties are model checked can be specified at a very high level with rewrite rules. This paper answers a nontrivial challenge, namely, to be able to build a model checker to model check LTLR formulas on rewrite theories with relatively little effort by reusing Maudeʼs LTL model checker for rewrite theories. For this, the reflective features of both rewriting logic and its Maude implementation have proved extremely useful

Strategic Executions of Choreographed Timed Normative Multi-Agent Systems

This paper proposes a combined mechanism for coordinating agents in timed normative multi-agent systems. Timing constraints in a multi-agent system make it possible to force action execution to happen before certain time invariants are violated. In such multiagent systems we achieve coordination at two orthogonal levels with respect to states and actions. On the one hand, the behaviour of individual agents is regulated by means of social and organisational inspired concepts like norms and sanctions. On the other hand, the behaviour of sets of agents is restricted according to action-based coordination mechanisms called choreographies. In both cases, the resulting behaviour is constrained by time