Modeling and analysis of data dependencies in business process for data-intensive services

Abstract

With the growing popularity of data-intensive services on the Internet, the traditional process-centric model for business process meets challenges due to the lack of abilities to describe data semantics and dependencies, resulting in the inflexibility of the design and implement for the processes. This paper proposes a novel data-aware business process model which is able to describe both explicit control flow and implicit data flow. Data model with dependencies which are formulated by Linear-time Temporal Logic (LTL) is presented, and their satisfiability is validated by an automaton-based model checking algorithm. Data dependencies are fully considered in modeling phase, which helps to improve the efficiency and reliability of programming during developing phase. Finally, a prototype system based on jBPM for data-aware workflow is designed using such model, and has been deployed to Beijing Kingfore heating management system to validate the flexibility, efficacy and convenience of our approach for massive coding and large-scale system management in reality.