A Formal Verification of the Integration of Activity and Goal-Based Workflows

Abstract

The spectrum of business process workflow models goes from prescriptive approaches, which enforce a particular behavior to achieve the business process goals, to descriptive approaches, which state what are the goals to achieve but do not define how they can be achieved. The former promote the standardization of the organizational behavior whereas the latter empower the worker, knowledge worker, to apply its domain-specific knowledge whenever unexpected situations occur. I propose an approach that integrates these two different perspectives of the same business process. I use a formalization, using the Alloy specification language, that integrates two different models of the same business process, an activity model, which enforces a particular set of paths of execution, and a goal model, which only enforces the minimal set of conditions necessary to achieve the business goal, such that a larger number of execution paths is allowed. Alloy is used to verify the correctness of the design process of the two models, activity and goal, which preserves their inter-consistency. Therefore, the business process goals can be achieved according to any of the models, and any intermediate state of the execution, in both the activity and goal models, preserves a set of model invariants. This approach merges the best of both worlds by integrating two different models of the same business process. Some recent research also proposes the mapping between different representations of business processes but consider one of them as primary, the one which is used for execution.