Formalizing Artifact-Centric Business Processes - Towards a Conformance Testing Approach

Abstract

Recently, Artifact-Centric Business Processes have emerged as an approach in which processes are centred on data as a "first-class citizen". A key challenge faced by such processes is to develop effective mechanisms that support formal specification, validation and verification of their static and dynamic behaviours i.e., the data of interest and how they evolve. We present, in this paper, a novel approach that allows on one hand, formalizing Artifact-Centric Business Process Models described in UML as an executable formal specification in the Maude and its strategy language and, on the other hand, testing whether the implementation of such models is conformant to its specification using all possible scenarios that are described as Maude strategies. One of the main reasons for using Maude-Strategy language is due to its execution environment in which the use of a wide range of formal methods is facilitated.

A Non-Deterministic Multiset Query Language

“…Data-centric business process models are formalized in a variety of ways. First-order logic and its restricted variations (see e.g., [25,26,27,28]), datalog [29], and UML [30], are popular choices. Those formalisms are excellent for the specification of data models, and they come with expressive query languages; they are, however, not so ideally suited for modelling change, because of frame problems [31], where it is not always obvious what information is modified and what stays the same.…”