Verifiable UML Artifact-Centric Business Process Models

Abstract

Artifact-centric business process models have gained increasing momentum recently due to their ability to combine structural (i.e., data related) with dynamical (i.e., process related) aspects. In particular, two main lines of research have been pursued so far: one tailored to business artifact modeling languages and methodologies, the other focused on the foundations for their formal verification. In this paper, we merge these two lines of research, by showing how recent theoretical decidability results for verification can be fruitfully transferred to a concrete UML-based modeling methodology. In particular, we identify additional steps in the methodology that, in significant cases, guarantee the possibility of verifying the resulting models against rich first-order temporal properties. Notably, our results can be seamlessly transferred to different languages for the specification of the artifact lifecycles.

Verification and Validation of UML Artifact-Centric Business Process Models

“…In this paper we adopt the BAUML modeling approach [4], which represents the BALSA dimensions using UML and OCL: UML class diagrams for business artifacts; UML state transition diagrams for lifecycles; UML activity diagrams for associations, and OCL operation contracts for services.…”

“…The main contribution of our work is to propose an approach to verify and validate an artifact-centric BPM specified in BAUML [4], 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.…”

“…In [14] we did not consider the notion of business artifact, nor state transition diagrams and activity diagrams during reasoning. In [4] we identified sufficient conditions over BAUML models which guarantee decidability of verification, and which can be applied to this work.…”

Specifying Artifact-Centric Business Process Models in UML

“…Moreover, it is also possible to establish restrictions over these models to ensure that the verification that can be performed on them is decidable [10].…”

“…Our approach allows also automated reasoning from the business process models (as shown on [9,10]), while most of the existing proposals that handle reasoning are based on models which use languages grounded on complex mathematical notations [11,12,13] which are not practical at the business level.…”