Formal Verification of Temporal Constraints and Allocated Cloud Resources in Business Processes

Abstract

Cloud environments offer an interesting infrastructure for any modern enterprise information systems due to their high performance and low operating cost. Cloud resources are offered in various pricing strategies based on temporal properties. In general, enterprises looking towards minimizing their spending on IT infrastructure find such pricing strategies very attractive to deploy and run their business processes. Nevertheless, due to the lack of explicit and formal description of (Cloud) resources in existing business processes modeling languages, such as BPMN, Cloud resources can not be correctly allocated. Therefore, we elaborate an extension to BPMN 2.0 to fully integrate (Cloud) resource perspective, especially the temporal properties of Cloud pricing strategies in business process model. In order to help the designer to allocate correctly the required Cloud resources, we propose an automatic generation of timed automata from this BPMN extensions to check the matching between both temporal constraints: activities and Cloud resources. To show its feasibility, our approach has been implemented and tested using a real use case from an industrial partner.