Verification Of Business Processes Research Articles

Verification and validation of business processes in business architecture using the formal method with V-Model concept

In implementing EA itself, problems often occur, such as the incoherence and synchronization of business strategy with technology. To be able to find out the possibility that there is an error and quality in the company's business processes, it is necessary to carry out verification and validation. The stages of testing verification and validation of business processes use V-Model which has 3 layers. The results of this research will later become an improvement for the company to achieve effectiveness and efficiency in optimizing the company's business processes.

Model to Program and Blockchain Approaches for Business Processes and Workflows in Finance

Business process modeling and verification have become an essential way to control and assure organizational evolution. We overview the opportunities for the application of blockchain in Business Process Management and Modeling in Finance and we focus on in-depth analysis of claim process in insurance as a use case. We investigate the utilization of blockchain technology for model checking of Workflow, Business Processes to ensure consistency, integrity, and security in a dynamically changing business environment. We create a UML profile for the blockchain, then we combine it with a UML activity diagram followed by a verification using Petri nets to guarantee a distributed computing system and scalable with mutable data. Our paper creates a unified picture of the approaches towards business processes modeling used in the financial industry organized around the set of premises intending to develop a future research agenda for blockchain business process modeling, specifically for the financial industry domain.

Multi-criteria decision analysis for non-conformance diagnosis: A priority-based strategy combining data and business rules

Business process analytics and verification have become a major challenge for companies, especially when process data is stored across different systems. It is important to ensure Business Process Compliance in both data-flow perspectives and business rules that govern the organisation. In the verification of data-flow accuracy, the conformance of data to business rules is a key element, since essential to fulfil policies and statements that govern corporate behaviour. The inclusion of business rules in an existing and already deployed process, which therefore already counts on stored data, requires the checking of business rules against data to guarantee compliance. If inconsistency is detected then the source of the problem should be determined, by discerning whether it is due to an erroneous rule or to erroneous data. To automate this, a diagnosis methodology following the incorporation of business rules is proposed, which simultaneously combines business rules and data produced during the execution of the company processes. Due to the high number of possible explanations of faults (data and/or business rules), the likelihood of faults has been included to propose an ordered list. In order to reduce these possibilities, we rely on the ranking calculated by means of an AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and incorporate the experience described by users and/or experts. The methodology proposed is based on the Constraint Programming paradigm which is evaluated using a real example. .

Analysis of Business Processes and Performance of Manufacturing MSMES in Village Cileles Lebak Banten

Business process analysis is a term that has a broad enough meaning for a.structere of different tactics such as simulation and diagnosis, verification and performance analysis of business processes This study aims to 1)analyze the business processes of manufacturing MSMEs ranging from production processes to marketing 2)How problems and constraints on business performance conditions now and in the future 3) What factors cause fluctuating performance of MSMEs , knowing what problems and constraints arise in the business process of MSMEs , 4) Knowing the size of the performance of MSMEs, analyzing the data and concluding the right problem solutions to improve the business processes of MSMEs and.utilizing information technology more maximally for the business processes of MSMEs. So that in the end, it can increase its income more maximally by itself can contribute to increase the income of rural communities. Considering that the village is still classified as a lagging village. The methods used to answer the problems in this study are Location Quotient Analysis (LQ), Descriptive Analysis, and SWOT Analysis. The result of LQ is known that in Kec.Cileles there are 6 sectors that are the base sector, namely agriculture, mining and quarrying, building, trading, home industry and restaurant, finance rental and corporate services, as well as other services, Then the absorption of labor dominant sector is in the processing industry sector. While swot results are known that the strategy that can be done is to maximize the potential of the industrial sector of holticulture product processing, improve the quality of human resources, and provide specifications on the type of superior products.
 

Conversion and Verification of Business Processes from a BPMN Model to a Colored Petri Nets Model

Conversion and Verification of Business Processes from a BPMN Model to a Colored Petri Nets Model

Asynchronous Runtime Verification of Business Processes: Proof of Concept

Asynchronous Runtime Verification of Business Processes: Proof of Concept

Верификация знаний, полученных при изучении моделей бизнес-процессов

The paper focuses on the method of formal verification of knowledge obtained in the study of business process models. As a formal language for the presentation and verification of business processes, a certain version of π-calculus was chosen, and linear temporal modal logic was chosen as a language for formulating test assignments, i.e., questions, to be checked. The paper gives the rationale for such choice, and considers the principles of developing the test assignments in the language of modal logic and their usage for knowledge verification. The study proposes to automate knowledge testing with logic programs obtained as a result of the transition from a description of business processes to a verification program in the logical programming language Visual Prolog. The formal knowledge verification technique is illustrated by examples of knowledge verification. Findings of research show how the transition from the description of business processes to the procedures of formal verification of knowledge is carried out. The prospects for the development of the proposed method are discussed

Process mining approach to formal business process modelling and verification: a case study

Purpose The need for assuring correctness of business processes in enterprises is widely recognised in terms of business process re-engineering and improvement. Formal methods are a promising approach to this issue. The challenge in business process verification is to create a formal model that is well-aligned to the reality. Process mining is a well-known technique to discover a model of a process based on facts. However, no studies exist that apply it to formal verification. This study aims to propose a methodology for formal business process verification by means of process mining, and attempts to clarify the challenges and necessary technologies in this approach using a case study. Design/methodology/approach A trading company simulation model is used as a case study. A workflow model is discovered from an event log produced by a simulation tool and manually complemented to a formal model. Correctness requirements of both domain-dependent and domain-independent types of the model are checked by means of model-checking. Findings For business process verification with both domain-dependent and domain-independent correctness requirements, more advanced process mining techniques that discover data-related aspects of processes are desirable. The choice of a formal modelling language is also crucial. It depends on the correctness requirements and the characteristics of the business process. Originality/value Formal verification of business processes starting with creating its formal model is quite new. Furthermore, domain-dependent and domain-independent correctness properties are considered in the same framework, which is also new. This study revealed necessary technologies for this approach with process mining.

Prognosis of multiple instances in time-aware declarative business process models

Technological evolution, heading for industry 4.0, makes companies tend to automate their management and operation, ideally defining it through business process models. To describe policies or rules related to the execution order of the activities in an organization, Declarative Business Process Models permit a relaxed description of activity order, which needs monitoring to detect non-conforming behaviors. Commonly, the detection of a violation implies that the malfunction has already occurred, being better to avoid the violation in advance. To predict future violations, prognosis is required.To allow the modeling of real business behavior, an extension of declarative business process models including both time patterns and multiple instances is proposed. This new model can be used to prognosticate if current process instances may violate a defined model in the future, according to the analysis of the robustness of the process instances evolution. The proposed Model-Based Prognosis is based on analyzing the event traces that represent the current instances and propagate their possible progression through the Constraint Programming paradigm. To ascertain if the model could be violated, it is analyzed how its robustness can tackle unexpected behaviors.To complete the formalization and modeling, an implementation applied to a real medical example is included in the paper. The prognosis of concurrent instances is addressed, dealing with formalized time and activity patterns even considering the resource availability, and getting acceptable execution times.The automatic verification and prognosis of declarative business processes are addressed considering concurrency and synchronization of multiple instances, performing well in terms of execution time.

A New Business Process Verification Approach for E-Commerce Using Petri Nets

The design, modeling, optimization, reengineering, and coupling of business processes in e-commerce environment have gradually become a hot research topic. Business processes must be strictly described and validated by formal methods to ensure their reliability and efficiency. This paper systematically studies the introduction of new business process characteristics into behavioral temporal logic and extend TLA to obtain a new logic system PTLA, which enriches the theoretical system of formal method of business process under the environment of e-commerce. The paper also discusses Petri nets and show how to convert Petri nets into TLA. A parallel Petri net model was built to represent the dynamic, concurrency and flexibility, and cross-organizational e-commerce business process. Finally, the use of simulation to extend the business process execution language BPEL to TLA.

Business process specification, verification, and deployment in a mono-cloud, multi-edge context

Despite the prevalence of cloud and edge computing, ensuring the satisfaction of time-constrained business processes, remains challenging. Indeed, some cloud/edge-based resources might not be available when needed leading to delaying the execution of these processes? tasks and/or the transfer of these processes? data. This paper presents an approach for specifying, verifying, and deploying time constrained business processes in a mono-cloud, multi-edge context. First, the specification and verification of processes happen at design-time and run-time to ensure that these processes? tasks and data are continuously placed in a way that would mitigate the violation of time constraints. This mitigation might require moving tasks and/or data from one host to another to reduce time latency, for example. A host could be either a cloud, an edge, or any. Finally, the deployment of processes using a real case-study allowed to confirm the benefits of the early specification and verification of these processes in mitigating time constraints violations.

Hypercube Graph Decomposition for Boolean Simplification: An Optimization of Business Process Verification

This paper deals with the optimization of busi-ness processes (BP) verification by simplifying their equivalent algebraic expressions. Actual approaches of business processes verification use formal methods such as automated theorem proving and model checking to verify the accuracy of the business process design. Those processes are abstracted to mathematical models in order to make the verification task possible. However, the structure of those mathematical models is usually a Boolean expression of the business process variables and gateways. Thus leading to a combinatorial explosion when the number of literals is above a certain threshold. This work aims at optimizing the verification task by managing the problem size. A novel algorithm of Boolean simplification is proposed. It uses hypercube graph decomposition to find the minimal equivalent formula of a business process model given in its disjunctive normal form (DNF). Moreover, the optimization method is totally automated and can be applied to any business process having the same formula due to the independence of the Boolean simplification rules from the studied processes. This new approach has been numerically validated by comparing its performance against the state of the art method Quine-McCluskey (QM) through the optimization of several processes with various types of branching.

LTL on Finite and Process Traces: Complexity Results and a Practical Reasoner

Linear temporal logic (LTL) is a modal logic where formulas are built over temporal operators relating events happening in different time instants. According to the standard semantics, LTL formulas are interpreted on traces spanning over an infinite timeline. However, applications related to the specification and verification of business processes have recently pointed out the need for defining and reasoning about a variant of LTL, which we name LTLp, whose semantics is defined over process traces, that is, over finite traces such that, at each time instant, precisely one propositional variable (standing for the execution of some given activity) evaluates true.
 The paper investigates the theoretical underpinnings of LTLp and of a related logic formalism, named LTLf, which had already attracted attention in the literature and where formulas have the same syntax as in LTLp and are evaluated over finite traces, but without any constraint on the number of variables simultaneously evaluating true. The two formalisms are comparatively analyzed, by pointing out similarities and differences. In addition, a thorough complexity analysis has been conducted for reasoning problems about LTLp and LTLf, by considering arbitrary formulas as well as classes of formulas defined in terms of restrictions on the temporal operators that are allowed. Finally, based on the theoretical findings of the paper, a practical reasoner specifically tailored for LTLp and LTLf has been developed by leveraging state-of-the-art SAT solvers. The behavior of the reasoner has been experimentally compared with other systems available in the literature.

Are we done with business process compliance: state of the art and challenges ahead

Literature on business process compliance (BPC) has predominantly focused on the alignment of the regulatory rules with the design, verification and validation of business processes. Previously surveys on BPC have been conducted with specific context in mind; however, the literature on BPC management research is largely sparse and does not accumulate a detailed understanding on existing literature and related issues faced by the domain. This survey provides a holistic view of the literature on existing BPC management approaches, and categories them based on different compliance management strategies in the context of formulated research questions. A systematic literature approach is used where search terms pertaining keywords were used to identify literature related to the research questions from scholarly databases. From initially 183 papers, we selected 79 papers related to the themes of this survey published between 2000{2015. The survey results reveal that mostly compliance management approaches center around three distinct categories namely: design-time (28%), run-time (32%) and auditing (10%). Also, organisational and internal control based compliance management frameworks (21%) and hybrid approaches make (9%) of the surveyed approaches. Furthermore, open research challenges and gaps are identified and discussed with respect to the compliance problem.

Compositional execution semantics for business process verification

Service compositions are programmed as executable business processes in languages like WS-BPEL (or BPEL in short). In such programs, activities are nested within concurrency, isolation, compensation and event handling constructs that cause an overwhelming number of execution paths. Program correctness has to be verified based on a formal definition of the language semantics. For BPEL , previous works have proposed execution semantics in formal languages amenable to model checking. Most of the times the service composition structure is not preserved in the formal model, which impedes tracing the verification findings in the original program. Here, we propose a compositional semantics and a structure-preserving translator of BPEL programs onto the BIP component framework. In addition, we verify essential correctness properties that affect process responsiveness, and the compliance with partner services. The scalability of the proposed translation and analysis is demonstrated on BPEL programs of various sizes. Our compositional translation approach can be also applied to other executable languages with nesting syntax.

Add Data into Business Process Verification: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice

The need to extend business process languages with the capability to model complex data objects along with the control flow perspective has lead to significant practical and theoretical advances in the field of Business Process Modeling (BPM).On the practical side, there are several suites for control flow and data modeling; nonetheless, when it comes to formal verification, the data perspective is abstracted away due to the intrinsic difficulty of handling unbounded data. On the theoretical side, there is significant literature providing decidability results for expressive data-aware processes. However, they struggle to produce a concrete impact as being far from real BPM architectures and, most of all, not providing actual verification tools. In this paper we aim at bridging such a gap: we provide a concrete framework which, on the one hand, being based on Petri Nets and relational models, is close to the widely used BPM suites, and on the other is grounded on solid formal basis which allow to perform formal verification tasks. Moreover, we show how to encode our framework in an action language so as to perform reachability analysis using virtually any state-of-the-art planner.

Temporal Verification of Business Processes Using BPMN and CPN

Temporal Verification of Business Processes Using BPMN and CPN

Formal verification of complex business processes based on high-level Petri nets

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) has been widely used as a tool for business process modeling. However, BPMN suffers from a lack of standard formal semantics. This weakness can lead to inconsistencies, ambiguities, and incompletenesses within the developed models. In this paper, we propose a formal semantics of BPMN using recursive ECATNets. Owing to this formalism, a large set of BPMN features such as cancellation, multiple instantiation of subprocesses and exception handling can be covered while taking into account the data flow aspect. The benefits and usefulness of this modelling are illustrated through three examples. Moreover, since recursive ECATNets semantics is defined in terms of conditional rewriting logic, one can use the Maude LTL model checker to verify several behavioral properties related to BPMN models. The work presented in this document has been automated through the development of a first prototype.

Specification of behavioral anti-patterns for the verification of block-structured Collaborative Business Processes

Context: The verification of the control flow of a Collaborative Business Process (CBP) is important when developing cross-organizational systems, since the control flow defines the behavior of the cross-organizational collaboration. Behavioral anti-patterns have been proposed to improve the performance of formal verification methods. However, a systematic approach for the discovery and specification of behavioral anti-patterns of CBPs has not been proposed so far.Objective: The aim of this work is an approach to systematically discover and specify the behavioral anti-patterns of block-structured CBP models.Method:The approach proposes using the metamodel of a CBP language to discover all possible combinations of constructs leading to a problem in the behavior of block-structured CBPs. Each combination is called minimal CBP. The set of all minimal CBPs with behavioral problems defines the unsoundness profile of a CBP language, from which is possible specifying the behavioral anti-patterns of such language.Results: The approach for specification of behavioral anti-patterns was applied to the UP-ColBPIP language. Twelve behavioral anti-patterns were defined, including support to complex control flow such as advanced synchronization, cancellation and exception management, and multiple instances. Anti-patterns were evaluated on a repository of block-structured CBP models and compared with a formal verification method. Results show that the verification based on anti-patterns is as accurate as the formal method, but it clearly improves the performance of the latter.Conclusion: By using the proposed approach, it is possible to systematically specify behavioral anti-patterns for block-structured CBP languages. During the discovery of anti-patterns different formalisms can be used. With this approach, the specification of anti-patterns provides the exact combination of elements that can cause a problem, making error correction and result interpretation easier. Although the proposed approach was defined for the context of CBPs, it could be applied to the context of intra-organizational processes.

Model checking Petri nets with names using data-centric dynamic systems

Abstract Petri nets with name creation and management ( ν -PNs) have been recently introduced as an expressive model for dynamic (distributed) systems, whose dynamics are determined not only by how tokens flow in the system, but also by the pure names they carry. On the one hand, this extension makes the resulting nets strictly more expressive than P/T nets: they can be exploited to capture a plethora of interesting systems, such as distributed systems enriched with channels and name passing, service interaction with correlation mechanisms, and resource-constrained workflow nets that explicitly account for process instances. On the other hand, fundamental properties like coverability, termination and boundedness are decidable for ν -PNs. In this work, we go one step beyond the verification of such general properties, and provide decidability and undecidability results of model checking ν -PNs against variants of first-order μ -calculus, recently proposed in the area of data-aware process analysis. While this model checking problem is undecidable in the general case, decidability can be obtained by considering different forms of boundedness, which still give raise to an infinite-state transition system. We then ground our framework to tackle the problem of soundness checking over workflow nets enriched with explicit process instances and resources. Notably, our decidability results are obtained via a translation to data-centric dynamic systems, a recently devised framework for the formal specification and verification of data-aware business processes working over full-fledged relational databases with constraints. In this light, our results contribute to the cross-fertilization between the area of formal methods for concurrent systems and that of foundations of data-aware processes, which has not been extensively investigated so far.