Formal Verification of Temporal Constraints for Mobile Service-Based Business Process Models

Abstract

Service-based business processes are typically used for achieving business goals through the execution of a set of activities. These activities are usually implemented upon mobile devices in terms of mobile services in a dynamic and pervasive environment. The execution of business processes is recorded in event logs in contemporary enterprise information systems and is discovered, monitored, and improved leveraging process mining techniques. However, process mining from time perspective which has been evolving as an emerging principle for supporting the temporal analysis of these mobile service-based business processes has not been explored extensively. To address this challenge, we propose to extend the mobile service-based business process model on the basis of the specification and verification of temporal constraints. A timed business process model is proposed where the relative and absolute temporal constraints correspond to each individual activity, sets of activities with control relations, and edges between activities or gateways are estimated. Conformance checking is implemented for the verification and improvement of the proposed model with respect to the accuracy, precision, and recall. Extensive evaluations and comparison of our technique with the state of the art are conducted based on publicly available real-life event logs, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and verification of the proposed model.