Analysis on demand: Instantaneous soundness checking of industrial business process models

Fahland, Dirk; Favre, Cédric; Koehler, Jana; Lohmann, Niels; Völzer, Hagen; Wolf, Karsten

doi:10.1016/j.datak.2011.01.004

Cited by 125 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The systems were selected from a collection of 735 models [27]. To ensure that each system has a unique terminal marking, unsound systems [28] were filtered out.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The 4C Spectrum of Fundamental Behavioral Relations for Concurrent Systems

Polyvyanyy

Weidlich

Conforti

et al. 2014

Application and Theory of Petri Nets and Concurrency

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Abstract. The design of concurrent software systems, in particular process-aware information systems, involves behavioral modeling at various stages. Recently, approaches to behavioral analysis of such systems have been based on declarative abstractions defined as sets of behavioral relations. However, these relations are typically defined in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we address the lack of a systematic exploration of the fundamental relations that can be used to capture the behavior of concurrent systems, i.e., co-occurrence, conflict, causality, and concurrency. Besides the definition of the spectrum of behavioral relations, which we refer to as the 4C spectrum, we also show that our relations give rise to implication lattices. We further provide operationalizations of the proposed relations, starting by proposing techniques for computing relations in unlabeled systems, which are then lifted to become applicable in the context of labeled systems, i.e., systems in which state transitions have semantic annotations. Finally, we report on experimental results on efficiency of the proposed computations.

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“…The systems were selected from a collection of 735 models [27]. To ensure that each system has a unique terminal marking, unsound systems [28] were filtered out.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The 4C Spectrum of Fundamental Behavioral Relations for Concurrent Systems

Polyvyanyy

Weidlich

Conforti

et al. 2014

Application and Theory of Petri Nets and Concurrency

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Quality issues like the deadlock in Figure 1 can be efficiently found for different classes of process models. Languages, like BPMN, EPCs, or UML Activity Diagrams, that can be mapped to free-choice Petri nets can be checked for soundness in quadratic time [17], structured models in linear time [18]. There are also techniques available for checking the correctness of data flow [19,20,21], satisfiability of constraints on the resource perspective [22,23,24], or the interoperability of cross-organizational workflows [25].…”

Section: Perspectives On Process Model Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Algorithm 5 proceeds with the analysis of activity labels of action-noun (of ) style (lines [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. The label part preceding preposition of is recognized as an action.…”

Section: Derivation Of Action and Objectmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the refactoring of activity labels in business process models

Leopold

Smirnov

Mendling

2012

Information Systems

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Large corporations increasingly utilize business process models for documenting and redesigning their operations. The extent of such modeling initiatives with several hundred models and dozens of often hardly trained modelers calls for automated quality assurance. While formal properties of control flow can easily be checked by existing tools, there is a notable gap for checking the quality of the textual content of models, in particular, its activity labels. In this paper, we address the problem of activity label quality in business process models. We designed a technique for the recognition of labeling styles, and the automatic refactoring of labels with quality issues. More specifically, we developed a parsing algorithm that is able to deal with the shortness of activity labels, which integrates natural language tools like WordNet and the Stanford Parser. Using three business process model collections from practice with differing labeling style distributions, we demonstrate the applicability of our technique. In comparison to a straightforward application of standard natural language tools, our technique provides much more stable results. As an outcome, the technique shifts the boundary of process model quality issues that can be checked automatically from syntactic to semantic aspects.

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“…Our implementation translates business process models described in the IBM WebSphere Business Modeler language into workflow graphs [10] and then applies a completion technique by Kiepuszewski et al [17] (cf. also [10]) to obtain a workflow graph with a unique sink, as required by our technique.…”

Section: Experimental Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An experimental study [10] has shown that whereas naive state-space exploration is not sufficient to analyze the state spaces of business process models, with appropriate reduction techniques, state space exploration can check soundness of an industrial process model in less than a second. However, the traces obtained can be large and contain many transitions that do not contribute to the actual control-flow error [11], which requires additional techniques to trim the trace [12,13], whereas our structural error patterns represent control-flow errors concisely.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diagnostic Information for Control-Flow Analysis of Workflow Graphs (a.k.a. Free-Choice Workflow Nets)

Favre

Völzer

Müller

2016

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

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Abstract. A workflow graph is a classical flow graph extended by concurrent fork and join. Workflow graphs can be used to represent the main control-flow of e.g. business process models modeled in languages such as BPMN or UML activity diagrams. They can also be seen as compact representations of free-choice Petri nets with a unique start and a unique end. A workflow graph is said to be sound if it is free of deadlocks and exhibits no lack of synchronization, which correspond to liveness and safeness of a slightly modified version of the corresponding Petri net. We present a new characterization of unsoundness of workflow graphs in terms of three structural, i.e., graphical error patterns. We also present a polynomialtime algorithm that decides unsoundness and returns for each unsound workflow graph, one of the three structural error patterns as diagnostic information. An experimental evaluation on over 1350 workflow graphs derived from industrial business process models suggests that our technique performs well in practice.

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Analysis on demand: Instantaneous soundness checking of industrial business process models

Cited by 125 publications

References 25 publications

The 4C Spectrum of Fundamental Behavioral Relations for Concurrent Systems

The 4C Spectrum of Fundamental Behavioral Relations for Concurrent Systems

On the refactoring of activity labels in business process models

Diagnostic Information for Control-Flow Analysis of Workflow Graphs (a.k.a. Free-Choice Workflow Nets)

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