Beyond soundness: on the verification of semantic business process models

Abstract

The verification of control-flow soundness is well understood as an important step before deploying business process models. However, the control flow does not capture what the process activities actually do when they are executed. Semantic annotations offer the opportunity to take this into account. Inspired by semantic Web service approaches such as OWL-S and WSMO, we consider process models in which the individual activities are annotated with logical preconditions and effects, specified relative to an ontology that axiomatizes the underlying business domain. Verification then addresses the overall process behavior, arising from the interaction between control-flow and behavior of individual activities. To this end, we combine notions from the workflow community with notions from the AI actions and change literature. We introduce a formal execution semantics for annotated business processes. We point out four verification tasks that arise, concerning precondition/effect conflicts, reachability, and executability. We examine the borderline between classes of processes that can, or cannot, be verified in polynomial time. For precondition/effect conflicts, we show that the borderline is the same as that of the Communicated by Asuman Dogac.The major part of this work was conducted while the first and second authors worked for SAP Research, Karlsruhe. 272 Distrib Parallel Databases (2010) 27: 271-343 logic underlying the ontology axioms. For reachability and executability, we identify a class of processes that can be verified in polynomial time by a fixpoint algorithm which we design for that purpose. We show that this class of processes is maximal in the sense that, when generalizing it in any of the most relevant directions, the validation tasks become computationally hard.

Verification and Validation of UML Artifact-Centric Business Process Models

“…Similarly to our work, [18] performs verification over process models considering the meaning of the tasks. These are annotated with preconditions and effects defined in logic, and use an ontology to define the underlying data.…”

Automated planning of process models: Design of a novel approach to construct exclusive choices

“…In contrast, the automated planning of process models focuses on the construction of to-be process models for a given planning problem. Further related work in the SBP analysis phase aims at examining the consistency of existing process models [13,34,55]. These approaches validate whether the actions (within a process model) are consistent both among themselves and with respect to the control flow patterns used.…”

On the refactoring of activity labels in business 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]. These correctness aspects are well understood and efficiently supported by tools for a wide range of process model classes.…”

“…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.…”