A Correctness Enforcement Approach for Collaborative Business Processes

Abstract

Collaborative business processes are indeed complex and difficult to be correctly designed as business processes involved in them are typically developed by different participating organizations and there is no way to foresee all potential interactions at design time. To this end, we propose a novel correctness enforcement approach for collaborative business processes. In this approach, given an original process, we first propose an algorithm for automatically detecting its correctness. Then, in case the original process is partially correct, we prune it to generate its core. The core captures all legal traces in the original process. Finally, an enforced process is yielded from the core through coordination mapping (i.e., inserting additional coordination activities into original processes). Our approach is implemented as a prototype tool called cet (a correctness enforcement tool for collaborative business processes), and a series of experiments is conducted to validate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach.