Modelling and verification of BPEL business processes

A business process is a complex web service with functions provided by different web services, which are already existing in web and are dynamically integrated for granting a more complex business task. For this reason, business processes have become more and more diffuse in B2B and B2C domains, so that the importance of their activities asks for a high-level of reliability. Methods and tools for supporting automatic system verification and validation could be useful. Among the techniques of automatic verification, we choose Model Checking method, because we applied it efficiently for verification of a single web service and in this paper we extend the area of application also in business processes. Descriptions of the behavior of a business process are coded using a standard language, BPEL4WS, that has broadly spread because it is able to describe a business process as both an executable process and an abstract process. Therefore, we model a BPEL description of a generic business process with a formal model and we formalize correctness properties about the reliability of the business process design. Also, we build a framework that performs automatic verification of formal models of business processes through NuSMV model checker. If there is a violation of correctness specifications, NuSMV provides counter-examples, so we can locate errors and effect right changes for correcting business process desig

Tabularizing the Business Knowledge: modeling, maintenance and validation

Achieving business flexibility implies to explicitly represent business knowledge and make it easy to understand for decision-makers. There is a renewed interest for decision tables as knowledge modeling formalism able to provide representation of the relationships among business conditions, actions and decisions with completeness and consistency. We explore the benefits of decision tables applied to modeling and management of business rules and constraints, finding the major advantages in their compact formalization, safe maintenance and automated validation

Tabularizing the Business Knowledge: modeling, maintenance and validation

Achieving business flexibility implies to explicitly represent business knowledge and make it easy to understand for decision-makers. There is a renewed interest for decision tables as knowledge modeling formalism able to provide representation of the relationships among business conditions, actions and decisions with completeness and consistency. We explore the benefits of decision tables applied to modeling and management of business rules and constraints, finding the major advantages in their compact formalization, safe maintenance and automated validation

Business Process Lines and Decision Tables Driving Flexibility by Selection

A major challenge faced by organizations is to better capture business strategies into products and services at an ever-increasing pace as the business environment constantly evolves. We propose a novel methodology base on a Business Process Line (BPL) engineering approach to inject flexibility into process modeling phase and promote reuse and flexibility by selection. Moreover we suggest a decision-table (DT) formalism for eliciting, tracking and managing the relationships among business needs, environmental changes and process tasks. In a real case study we practiced the proposed methodology by leveraging the synergy of feature models, variability mechanisms and decision tables. The application of DT-based BPL engineering approach proves that the Business Process Line benefits from fundamental concepts like composition, reusability and adaptability and satisfies the requirements for process definition flexibility

WAVer: A Model Checking-based Tool to Verify Web Application Design

Web Applications are becoming more and more widespread and efficient, then an increase of their reliability is now strongly required. Hence methods to support design and automatically perform validation of a Web Application (WA) could be helpful. In this paper we present WAVer, a prototype tool for performing the verification of a WA design by means of Symbolic Model Checking techniques. The tool first performs the modeling of the WA and furthermore verify it by means of a model checker. Specifically, the mathematical model of the WA is represented by a Finite State Machine (FSM). Then, by using the CTL formal language, we formalize basic criteria to establish correctness of the application. The prototype system we have implemented embeds a component which automatically imports WA design from a UML tool; CTL specifications are added and translated as source code for NuSMV model checker. Finally, the checker performs verification: if there is a violation of specifications, NuSMV allows to locate errors in WA design and appropriate adjustments are carried out