Checking Business Process Evolution

Abstract

A business process is a collection of structured activities producing a particular product or software. BPMN is a workflow-based graphical notation for specifying business processes. Formally analyzing such processes is a crucial challenge in order to avoid erroneous executions of the corresponding software. In this paper, we focus on timed business processes where execution time can be associated to several BPMN constructs. We propose an encoding of timed business processes into the Maude language, which allows one to automatically verify several properties of interest on processes such as the maximum/minimum/average execution time or the timed degree of parallelism that provides a valuable guide for the problem of resource allocation. The analysis is achieved using the rewriting-based tools available in Maude, which also provides other techniques (e.g., reachability analysis and model checking) for verifying BPMN specifications. We applied our approach on a large set of BPMN processes for evaluation purposes.