Modeling and enacting complex data dependencies in business processes

Enacting business processes in process engines requires the coverage of control flow, resource assignments, and process data. While the first two aspects are well supported in current process engines, data dependencies need to be added and maintained manually by a process engineer. Thus, this task is error-prone and time-consuming. In this report, we address the problem of modeling processes with complex data dependencies, e.g., m:n relationships, and their automatic enactment from process models. First, we extend BPMN data objects with few annotations to allow data dependency handling as well as data instance differentiation. Second, we introduce a pattern-based approach to derive SQL queries from process models utilizing the above mentioned extensions. Therewith, we allow automatic enactment of data-aware BPMN process models. We implemented our approach for the Activiti process engine to show applicability. Keywords: Process Modeling, Data Modeling, Process Enactment, BPMN, SQ

Linking data and BPMN processes to achieve executable models

We describe a formally well founded approach to link data and processes conceptually, based on adopting UML class diagrams to represent data, and BPMN to represent the process. The UML class diagram together with a set of additional process variables, called Artifact, form the information model of the process. All activities of the BPMN process refer to such an information model by means of OCL operation contracts. We show that the resulting semantics while abstract is fully executable. We also provide an implementation of the executor.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Handling Conflicts in Depth-First Search for LTL Tableau to Debug Compliance Based Languages

Providing adequate tools to tackle the problem of inconsistent compliance rules is a critical research topic. This problem is of paramount importance to achieve automatic support for early declarative design and to support evolution of rules in contract-based or service-based systems. In this paper we investigate the problem of extracting temporal unsatisfiable cores in order to detect the inconsistent part of a specification. We extend conflict-driven SAT-solver to provide a new conflict-driven depth-first-search solver for temporal logic. We use this solver to compute LTL unsatisfiable cores without re-exploring the history of the solver.Comment: In Proceedings FLACOS 2011, arXiv:1109.239

Verification of Query Completeness over Processes

Abstract. Data completeness is an essential aspect of data quality, and has in turn a huge impact on the effective management of companies. For example, statistics are computed and audits are conducted in companies by implicitly plac-ing the strong assumption that the analysed data are complete. In this work, we are interested in studying the problem of completeness of data produced by business processes, to the aim of automatically assessing whether a given database query can be answered with complete information in a certain state of the process. We formalize so-called quality-aware processes that create data in the real world and store it in the company’s information system possibly at a later point. We then show how one can check the completeness of database queries in a certain state of the process or after the execution of a sequence of actions, by leveraging on query containment, a well-studied problem in database theory.

SeGA: A Mediator for Artifact-Centric Business Processes

Abstract. Business processes (BPs) can be designed using a variety of model-ing languages and executed in different systems. In most BPM applications, the semantics of BPs needed for runtime management is often scattered across BP models, execution engines, and auxiliary stores of workflow systems. The in-ability to capture such semantics in BP models is the root cause for many BPM challenges. In this paper, an automated tool SeGA for wrapping BPs is developed. We demonstrate that SeGA provides a simple yet general framework for runtime querying and monitoring BP executions cross different BP management systems.

Verification of GSM-based artifact-centric systems through finite abstraction

Abstract. The GSM framework provides a methodology for the development of artifact-centric systems, an increasingly popular paradigm in service-oriented computing. In this paper we tackle the problem of verifying GSM programs in a multi-agent system setting. We provide an embedding from GSM into a suitable multi-agent systems semantics for reasoning about knowledge and time at the first-order level. While we observe that GSM programs generate infinite models, we isolate a large class of “amenable ” systems, which we show admit finite abstractions and are therefore verifiable through model checking. We illustrate the contribution with a procurement use-case taken from the relevant business process literature.

Digital terrestrial broadcasting An explanatory guide to the provisions introduced by the Broadcasting Act 1996

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