Verification of Business Process Designs Using Maps

Abstract

Business processes form the foundation of an enterprise’s operations and determine what the business does, and more importantly, how well the business does what it does. A systematic approach to the design of business processes, supported by a formal foundation for the specification and modeling of business processes, is necessary to (i) capture domain knowledge in a format that is transferable across enterprises and (ii) provide a basis for re-design based on needs of efficiency, changes in market requirements, and reproducibility of process templates for multiple products/services. The specification of a business process is often characterized by combinations of concurrency, choice, and asynchronous completion, the mix of which could lead to incorrect designs. This chapter highlights the verification issues that arise in the design of business processes, and outlines research questions of immediate relevance to the growing interest in business process modeling and enterprise automation solutions. We also discuss MAPS — a tool for the Modeling and Analysis of Process modelS, that has been used effectively as a classroom aid to highlight the importance of design verification as a necessary first step in the design of business processes.