Practical Compiler-Based User Support during the Development of Business Processes

Abstract

An erroneous execution of business processes causes high costs and could damage the prestige of the providing company. Therefore, validation of the correctness of business processes is essential. In general, business processes are described with Petri nets semantics, even though this kind of description allows only algorithms with a worse processing time and bad failure information to this moment.In this paper, we describe new compiler-based techniques that could be used instead of Petri net algorithms for the verification of business processes. Basic idea of our approach is, to start analyses on different points of workflow graphs and to find potential structural errors. These developed techniques improved other known approaches, as it guarantees a precise visualization and explanation of all determined structural errors, which substantially supports the development of business processes.

A First Step towards a Compiler for Business Processes

“…On the one hand, the transformation process was tested with the BPMN 2.0 benchmark of IBM http://www.zurich.ibm.com/csc/bit/downloads.html, and, on the other hand, the structural correctness verification was validated and evaluated with the business process benchmark of http://www.service-technology.org/soundness. Both algorithms run stable and take less than one millisecond in the average case (see our previous work [5] for more details). Therefore, the analysis can be done for every modification of the business process, instead only by saving or on demand.…”

“…Structural correctness is a standard problem of business processes and has been solved efficiently and with detailed failure information in our previous work [5,6]. The basic idea is to start the analysis for structural correctness at different points (nodes) of a workflow graph, which we call entrypoints.…”

“…In the second step, our algorithm for structural correctness verification [5,6] is performed directly on each workflow graph. The algorithm finds all potential deadlocks and lack of synchronization, and localizes them precisely.…”

“…In our previous work [5,6], we have introduced new compiler-based techniques to find structural errors within workflow graphs. Workflow graphs are a more formal representation of business processes containing exactly one start and one end node, activities, forks, joins, splits, and merges.…”

A Complete and the Most Liberal Semantics for Converging OR Gateways in Sound Processes

“…For this reason, in this paper, we provide a general definition of soundness for business processes which promises the absence of failures [11], [12], [13]. Our common definition of soundness makes it possible to define completeness, building a criterion to evaluate the quality of existing OR-join semantics with regard to the number of sound processes being successfully executable.…”