A Classification of BPMN Collaborations based on Safeness and Soundness Notions

Abstract

BPMN 2.0 standard has a huge uptake in modelling business processes within the same organisation or collaborations involving multiple interacting participants. It results that providing a solid foundation to enable BPMN designers to understand their models in a consistent way is becoming more and more important. In our investigation we define and exploit a formal characterisation of the collaborations' semantics, specifically and directly given for BPMN models, to provide a classification of BPMN collaborations. In particular, we refer to collaborations involving processes with arbitrary topology, thus overcoming the well-structuredness limitations. The proposed classification is based on some of the most important correctness properties in the business process domain, namely safeness and soundness. We prove, with a uniform formal framework, some conjectured and expected results and, most of all, we achieve novel results for BPMN collaborations concerning the relationships between safeness and soundness, and their compositionality, that represent major advances in the state-of-the-art.

A First-Order Logic Semantics for Communication-Parametric BPMN Collaborations

“…Our tool supports more verifications (see Table 4) and can be easily extended with new properties. We selected these three ones since they are more BPMN specific [7]. Table 3 presents the results for a selection from our repository [3] for a variety of gateways and activities.…”

“…These illustrative examples include realistic business process models (001 and 002 two client-supplier models, 006 from Fig. 2, 017 from [15], and 020 from [9]), and models dedicated to specific concerns: termination end events and sub processes (007-011 from [7]), inclusive gateways (003, 012, 013 and 018), exclusive and event-based gateways (015 and 016).…”

“…The formalization of the BPMN execution semantics, and on a wider scale the formal study of business processes, is a very active field of research. We here focus on recent work that provides tool support for the verification of collaboration diagrams and communication features in BPMN [7][8][9][10]14,16,20]. We add [11] due to its role as a seminal paper and [21,22] as recent representatives for the formal model they use.…”

“…These properties are generic properties related to any Business Process diagram, or specific properties for a given diagram. Some of the generic properties are safe collaboration, sound collaboration and messagerelaxed sound collaboration [7]. A collaboration is safe if no sequence flow holds more than one token:…”

“…The properties of interest are encoded in the TLA + theories we have implemented. They include usual correctness properties for workflows as well as ones (proposed more recently [7]) that are more specific to BPMN. Both tools are open source and freely available online.…”