Efficient Computation of Causal Behavioural Profiles Using Structural Decomposition

Abstract

Abstract. Identification of behavioural contradictions is an important aspect of software engineering, in particular for checking the consistency between a business process model used as system specification and a corresponding workflow model used as implementation. In this paper, we propose causal behavioural profiles as the basis for a consistency notion, which capture essential behavioural information, such as order, exclusiveness, and causality between pairs of activities. Existing notions of behavioural equivalence, such as bisimulation and trace equivalence, might also be applied as consistency notions. Still, they are exponential in computation. Our novel concept of causal behavioural profiles provides a weaker behavioural consistency notion that can be computed efficiently using structural decomposition techniques for sound free-choice workflow systems if unstructured net fragments are acyclic or can be traced back to S-or T-nets.

Service Discovery Using Communication Fingerprints

“…Our approach is complementary to testing observed behavior against model behavior using frequency profiles [1] and keeping repositories of behavioral profiles [18,17]. Both approaches apply to monolithic workflow and are restricted to transition occurrences.…”

A Foundational Approach for Managing Process Variability

“…Please refer to [38] for a discussion of the conceptual differences between the relations used in [37] and those of the behavioural profile. Our general idea of defining an algebra for managing process variants is inspired by an algebra for operating guidelines, a formal concept for the synthesis of interaction partners for a process [17].…”

Validation of Families of Business Processes

“…We focus on wellformedness constraints that are imposed by the BPMN language and by basic workflow patterns, described in the workflow pattern collection [7]. There is a difference of our notion of well-formedness constraints compared to existing work on behavioral profiles of Weidlich et al [8,9]. Firstly, they derive process behavior from a process model in order analyze and compare the behavior of business process models.…”

“…Weidlich et al [8,9] derive behavior profiles to describe the essential behavior in terms of activity relations like exclusivity, interleaving and ordering of activities. Weber et al [18] extend process models by semantic annotations and use them for the validation of process behavior correctness that captures control-flow interaction and behavior of activities.…”