Compiling business processes: untangling unstructured loops in irreducible flow graphs

2009

Inf Syst E-Bus Manage

Recent research has shown that business process models from practice suffer from several quality problems. In particular, the correctness of control flow has been analyzed for industry-scale collections of process models revealing that error ratios are surprisingly high. In the past the structuredness property has been discussed as a guideline to avoid errors, first in research on programming, and later also in business process modeling. In this paper we investigate the importance of structuredness for process model correctness from an empirical perspective. We introduce definitions of two metrics that quantify the (un)structuredness of a process model, the degree of structuredness and the unmatched connector count. Then, we use the event-driven process chain models of the SAP reference model for validating the capability of these metrics to predict error probability. Our findings clearly support the importance of structuredness as a design principle for achieving correctness in process models.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structuredness and its significance for correctness of process models

Laue¹,

2009

Inf Syst E-Bus Manage

“…Several approaches for deriving structured models from unstructured ones are discussed in the context of BPMN to BPEL transformations. These include refined process structure tree decomposition [93], untangling unstructured loops [101], and further transformation rules [88,53,56,55]. Synthesis can be used to transform a Petri net via a transition system into another behavior-equivalent Petri net.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refactoring large process model repositories

Weber

Reichert

et al. 2011

Computers in Industry

187

120

With the increasing adoption of process-aware information systems, large process model repositories have emerged. Typically, the models in such repositories are re-aligned to real-world events and demands through adaptation on a day-to-day basis. This bears the risk of introducing model redundancies and of unnecessarily increasing model complexity. If no continuous investment is made in keeping process models simple, changes will become more difficult and error-prone over time. Although refactoring techniques are widely used in software engineering to address similar problems, so far, no comparable state-of-the-art has evolved in the business process management domain. Process designers either have to refactor process models by hand or are simply unable to apply respective techniques at all. This paper proposes a catalogue of process model "smells" for identifying refactoring opportunities. In addition, it introduces a set of behavior-preserving techniques for refactoring large process repositories. The proposed refactorings enable process designers to effectively deal with model complexity by making process models better understandable and easier to maintain. The refactorings have been evaluated using large process repositories from the healthcare and automotive domain. To demonstrate the feasibility of the refactoring techniques, a proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented.

“…As for the latter construct (structured loops), these are oriented at the widely adopted BPEL language. BPEL directly enforces such a structure; recent process graph parsing techniques can be applied to untangle loops and move them into sub-processes [82,92].…”

Section: Process Graphsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond soundness: on the verification of semantic business process models

Weber

Hoffmann

Distrib Parallel Databases

2010

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.