Application of Formal Methods to Verify Business Processes

Abstract

Formal specifications and modeling languages can be used to provide support for Business Process (BP) analysts and designers to verify the behavior of BPs with respect to business performance indicators (i.e., service time, waiting time or queue size). This article presents the application of the Timed Automata (TA) formal language to check BPs modeled with Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) using the model checking verification technique. Also, a set of transformation rules and two algorithms are introduced to obtain TA-networks from BPMN models, allowing the formal specification of a BP-task model equivalent to the BPMN model. The approach presented here contributes to conduct the qualitative analysis of BPMN models.