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Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce market is expected to expand rapidly in coming years. In this context, organizations tend to rely more on business process management (BPM) to streamline their operations. The business process field is influenced by a wide range of temporal constraints which rise from legal, regulatory, and managerial rules. One of the most promising standards for business process modeling, namely the Business process Model and notation BPMN poorly addresses the time dimension so far. In this paper, we elaborate an extension to BPMN 2.0 to handle the time dimension. The aim of this BPMN extensions is to support business analysts and modellers in easily including the needed temporal constraints in their processes. We motivate and justify our proposed extensions by means of illustrative case studies. Furthermore, based on the proposed extensions, a verification approach based on the model checking technique is used to diagnose potential temporal violations of the process model. The work presented in this paper sets foundation for later automation of these constraints through process execution engines.

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Web services are the main pillar of the Service Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm which enables the application integration within and across business organizations. One of the important features of the Web services is the choreography aspect which allows to capture collaborative processes involving multiple services. In this context, one of the important investigations is the choreography compatibility analysis. We mean by the choreography compatibility the capability of a set of Web services of actually interacting by exchanging messages in a proper manner. Whether a set of services are compatible depends not only on their sequences of messages but also on quantitative properties such as timed properties. In this paper, we investigate a model checking based approach that deals with checking the compatibility of a choreography in which the Web services support asynchronous timed communications. Particularly, in this paper we are using the model checker UP-PAAL. We propose a set of required abstractions that allow to use the model checker UPPAAL to deal with timed asynchronous communicating services.

International audienceWeb services are becoming one of the main technologies for designing and building complex inter-enterprise business applications. Usually, a business application cannot be fulfilled by one Web service but by coordinating a set of them. In particular, to perform a coordination, one of the important investigations is the compatibility analysis. Two Web services are said compatible if they can interact correctly. In the literature, the proposed frameworks for the services compatibility checking rely on the supported sequences of messages. The interaction of services depends also on other properties, such that the exchanged data flow. Thus, considering only supported sequences of messages seems to be insufficient. Other properties on which the services interaction can rely on, are the temporal constraints. In this paper, we focus our interest on the compatibility analysis of Web services regarding their (1) supported sequences of messages, (2) the exchanged data flow, (3) constraints related to the exchanged data flow and (4) the temporal requirements. Based on these properties, we study three compatibility classes: (i) absolute compatibility, (ii) likely compatibility and (iii) absolute incompatibility

QoS-based service selection is one of the important requirements in Service Oriented Computing (SOC). A challenging task towards this purpose is the selection of the best combination of services that fulfils user's requirements while meeting quality of service (QoS) constraints. This challenge becomes more complex when dealing with time-dependent QoS values and temporal properties. Indeed, during the selection, mutual dependencies between the different temporal constraints may arise so that the selection of each service may influence or be influenced by the selection of other services. On other side, to find the best solution, all potential combinations must be compared. However, the number of these combinations may be very high, which can present a barrier for enabling effective service selection. In this paper, we present a heuristic based timeaware service selection approach to efficiently select a close-tooptimal combination of services. First, pruning techniques are adopted to reduce the search space. Second, a novel heuristic approach is proposed based on service clustering, constraints decomposition and local selection while considering both QoS and temporal constraints. Finally, experiments which confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of its timeliness and optimality, are conducted.

Purpose Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a generic language that is often extended by researchers, either for dealing with processes of specific domains or for improving the language itself. The purpose of this paper is to present a literature review that aims to determine the current state of the art of BPMN extensions and identify the gaps that should be filled in this research area. Design/methodology/approach For a comprehensive and effective analysis, a systematic literature review was conducted. After the collection and filtering of papers, 52 extensions were retained to be thoroughly examined and compared according to a set of criteria including objective, targeted domain, conformity to the extension mechanism, demonstration, implementation, etc. Findings The representation of the results in the form of tables and graphs allowed the authors to deduce several positive points on the extensions as their demonstration through concrete examples. On the other hand, the authors have observed several shortcomings and suggested recommendations for addressing them. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the literature review is the only one that evaluates and compares all BPMN extensions over the last four years, based on several criteria covering different aspects. Furthermore, the authors were able to verify the conformity of extensions as they were published after the introduction of the BPMN extension mechanism by the Object Management Group.

Formal specification and verification support of time-related constraints constitute fundamental challenges for any Business Process Management (BPM) system. Reluctantly, the literature on the subject of formal specification and verification of advanced temporal constraints such as absolute temporal constraints associated with relative temporal constraints is scarce. In this paper, we propose a novel approach enabling the formal specification and verification of advanced temporal constraints of business processes. The particularity of our approach is that it caters for relative and absolute related temporal constraints while relying on the dependencies that can exist between theses constraints. In fact, it is important to deal with such dependencies to handle the violations that can arise as soon as possible at design step. To do so, we propose a formal approach which relies on the timed automata formalism. In this context, we propose a set of mapping rules and algorithms where the semantic of timed automata is preserved even if we deal with absolute and relative temporal constraints. Using the defined formal model, we investigate a model checking based verification process that aims at validating business processes against their absolute and relative temporal constraints.