Ensuring the semantic correctness of a BAUML artifact-centric BPM

Abstract

Context: Using models to represent business processes provides several advantages, such as facilitating the communication between the stakeholders or being able to check the correctness of the processes before their implementation. In contrast to traditional process modeling approaches, the artifact-centric approach treats data as a key element of the process, also considering the tasks or activities that are performed in it. Objective: This paper presents a way to verify and validate the semantic correctness of an artifact-centric business process model defined using a combination of UML and OCL models - a BAUML model. Method: We achieve our goal by presenting several algorithms that encode the initial models into first-order logic, which then allows to use an existing satisfiability checking tool to determine their correctness. Results: An approach to verify and validate an artifact-centric BPM specified in BAUML, which uses a combination of UML and OCL models. To do this, we provide a method to translate all BAUML components into a set of logic formulas. The result of this translation ensures that the only changes allowed are those specified in the model, and that those changes are taking place according the order established by the model. Having obtained this logic representation, these models can be validated by any existing reasoning method able to deal with negation of derived predicates. Moreover, we show how to automatically generate the relevant tests to validate the models. We also show the feasibility of our approach by implementing a prototype tool and applying it to a running example. Conclusion: It is feasible to ensure the semantic correctness of an artifact-centric business process model in practice.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Automatic Business Process Model Extension to Repair Constraint Violations

“…There are several approaches to model artifact-centric BPM, ranging from more exible approaches [17] -which use condition-action rules instead of a BPMN, for instance -to procedural ones, such as ours, which establish a clear order for task execution [4,11,27]. To the best of our knowledge, there are no previous works which deal with constraint repair in artifact-centric process models and which generate an extension of the original model to carry out the repairs.…”

“…There are several approaches to verify and/or validate the correctness of artifactcentric business process models, such as [4,11,13,14,27]. However, these works focus on the correctness of the model as a whole and checking if it fullls certain desirable properties.…”

“…Despite the variety of existing proposals to specify artifact-centric Business Process Models (BPMs), there is a large consensus that any of them must contain at least a conceptual model for data, such as a UML class diagram [11], and a model for the processes, such as BPMN [8,28]. Linking data and processes along these two models has shown to be a feasible and practical way to achieve automatic executability of BPMs [5].…”

Conformance checking in UML artifact-centric business process models

“…The main contribution of our work is an approach to perform conformance checking on an artifact-centric framework, called BAUML [17,11], which considers not only the flow of the tasks, but also data constraints such as the one illustrated above. Unlike other works, our approach uses a starting framework based on a combination of UML and OCL models (both ISO standard languages, and well-known notations) which covers all the dimensions that should be present in artifact-centric process model [22].…”

“…Unlike other works, our approach uses a starting framework based on a combination of UML and OCL models (both ISO standard languages, and well-known notations) which covers all the dimensions that should be present in artifact-centric process model [22]. BAUML has been shown to be useful as a specification technique that allows providing automated reasoning over the models [17] while identifying verifiable conditions about them [11].…”