Business Processes Verification for e-Government Service Delivery

2017 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2017

Business Process Modelling has acquired increasing relevance in software development. Available notations, such as BPMN, permit to describe activities of complex organisations. On the one hand, this shortens the communication gap between domain experts and IT specialists. On the other hand, this permits to clarify the characteristics of software systems introduced to provide automatic support for such activities. Nevertheless, the lack of formal semantics hinders the automatic verification of relevant properties. This paper presents a novel verification framework for BPMN 2.0, called BProVe. It is based on an operational semantics, implemented using MAUDE, devised to make the verification general and effective. A complete tool chain, based on the Eclipse modelling environment, allows for rigorous modelling and analysis of Business Processes. The approach has been validated using more than one thousand models available on a publicly accessible repository. Besides showing the performance of BProVe, this validation demonstrates its practical benefits in identifying correctness issues in real models.

Proceedings. Sixth International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing, 2002

Today's business applications and their underlying process models are becoming more and more complicated, making the implementation of these processes an increasingly challenging task. On the one hand, tools and methods exist to describe the business processes. On the other hand, different tools and method exist to describe the IT artifacts implementing them. But a significant gap exists between the two. To overcome this gap, new methodologies are sought. In this paper, we discuss a pattern-based modeling and mapping process. Starting from a business process model, which emphasizes the underlying structural process pattern and its associated requirements, we map this model into a corresponding IT model based on nondeterministic automata with state variables. Model checking techniques are used to automatically verify elementary requirements on a process such as the termination and reachability of states. Using an example involving coupled, repetitive activities we discuss the advantages of an iterative process of correcting and refining a model based on insights gained in the interleaved verification steps.

2010 Third International Conference on Communication Theory, Reliability, and Quality of Service, 2010

I.

Formal Aspects of Computing, 2009

Both specification and verification of business processes are gaining more and more attention in the field. Most of the existing works in the last years are dealing with important, yet very specialized, issues. Among these, we can enumerate compensation constructs to cope with exceptions generated by long running business transactions, fully programmable fault and compensation handling mechanism, web service area, scope-based compensation and shared-labels for synchronization, and so on. The main purpose of this paper is to present a semi-automatized framework to describe and analyse business processes. Business analysts can now use a simple specification language (e.g., BPMN [Obj06]) to describe any type of activity in a company, in a concurrent and modular fashion. The associated programs (e.g., BPDs [Obj06]) have to be executed in an appropriate language (e.g., BPEL4WS [ACD+03]). Much more, they have to be confirmed to be sound, via some prescribed (a priori) conditions. We suggest how all the issues can be embedded in a unifying computer tool. We link our work with similar approaches and we justify our particular choices (besides BPMN and BPD): the TLA+ language for expressing the imposed behavioural conditions and Petri Nets ([EB87], [EB88]) to describe an intermediate semantics. In fact, we want to manage in an appropriate way the general relationship diagram (Fig. 1). Examples and case studies are provided. General relationship diagram

2009

Many governments worldwide are restructuring their business practices to improve their performances. To help describe and understand the process of restructuring, modeling techniques are used at different levels of modeling abstraction. This paper presents a new approach to the modeling of e-government business processes. It is based on two existing modeling techniques: Business Process Mapping (BPMapping) and UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM). The BPMapping technique provides an overall graphical representation of an organization depicting all different types of business processes, their inputs, outputs, and the environment in which the organization operates. The UMM methodology with its different business views gives details on collaborations and interactions of business processes. Combining BPMapping with UMM leads to a very expressive modeling approach which can provide artifact details at the higher levels of modeling abstraction and which also shows deployment strategies of the business processes. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, it is applied to the modeling of the Record Integrated Management business process at Quebec Government.

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2008

Business Process Modeling is increasingly important for the digitalization of both IT and non-IT business processes, as well as for their deployment on service-oriented architectures. A number of methodologies, languages, and software tools have been proposed to support digital business process design; nonetheless, a lot remains to be done for assessing a business process model validity with respect to an existing organizational structure or external constraints like the ones imposed by security compliance regulations. In particular, web-based business coalitions and other inter-organizational transactions pose a number of research problems. The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) provides a framework for representing processes at different levels of abstraction. In this paper, a MDA-driven notion of business process model is introduced, composed of a static domain model including the domain entities and actors, plus a platform-independent workflow model providing a specification of process activities. The paper focuses on semantics-aware representation techniques, introducing logics-based static domain models and their relationship with Description Logics and current Semantic Web metadata formats. Then, the paper discusses some issues emerging from the literature on business processes representation and presents some research directions on the evaluation of the compatibility of business and IT processes with existing organizational environments and practices. The problem of implicit knowledge and of its capture in a manner which allows it to be included in business process design is also discussed, presenting some open research issues.

Conference: 1st International Conference on Information Society, Technology and Management, ICIST 2011, At Kopaonik, Serbia, 2011

This paper presents an application of BPMN for the modeling of Tax Administration processes within the One-Stop-Shop system for the registration of business entities, using a modern software tool. The primary goal of this paper is to draw attention to a possible application of BPMN and to present some identified difficulties in ensuring simple means of process modeling and information sharing among the business users and process implementers. It was shown that BPMN facilitates communication among the key parties in cross-organizational e-Government. Additionally, the conclusion was that using BPMN can be a useful starting point for highlighting critical points in collaboration of involved processes.

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2015

Formal verification of business process models can be done through model checking (also known as property checking), where a model checker tool may automatically find violations of properties in a process model. This approach obviously has formal representations as a prerequisite. However, a key challenge for applying this approach in practice is to consistently formalize the process and its properties, which clearly cannot be done automatically. We studied this challenge in a case study of formally verifying an informally given business process against a guideline written like a legal text. Major lessons learned from this case study are that formalizing is key to success and that in its course a semi-formal representation of properties is useful. In the course of such a step-wise and incremental formalization, problems with the given process model have been found already, apart from those found with a model checker tool that used the formal property specification. In total, our approach revealed five problems not found by the official review. In summary, this paper investigates in a case study consistently formalizing a business process and its properties for verification through model checking.

2009

The 2009 Spring Simulation Multiconference (SpringSim'09) is an annual conference which covers state-of-the-art developments in computer simulation technologies, as well as scientific, industrial, and business applications. Areas covered include high-performance computing technologies, models and algorithms, GUI visualization technologies, communications and much more. Application disciplines covered include advanced telecommunication; computer systems; military, government & aerospace; environment, energy, and other industries. The conference includes keynote speeches presented by technology and industry leaders, technical sessions, professional development courses and seminars, as well as vendor exhibits. Scientists, engineers, managers, educators, and business professionals who develop or use simulation tools are invited to participate and present original papers. Proposals are solicited for papers, panels, tutorials, workshops, seminars, exhibits, social activities and for other presentation, discussion and sponsorship formats. People are always welcome to benefit by taking an organizing role. SpringSim'09 offers many ways to promote simulation products and to enhance corporate images. You are invited to use the Spring Simulation Multiconference in ways that best serve your interests.

1998

We present an application of the Spin model-checker in Testbed, a framework for business process reengineering. Business processes are described by end-users of Testbed in a graphi-cal language with a causality-based semantics, called Amber. The Amber language contains various constructs describing actions, causality relations, disabling, interaction and hierarchical composition. Data entities are modelled as variables that are handled by the business processes. We present a validation methodology for business processes using model-checking techniques. In this approach, an Amber speciication is automatically translated into a state machine description in Promela, which is the input language of the Spin model-checker. The correctness properties, concerning both the behavioural aspects and the data entities used in the speciication, are checked on the resulting Promela program using Spin. A prototype veriication toolset has been developed and successfully applied to various examples i...