Chiara Muzi

Bio: Chiara Muzi is an academic researcher from University of Camerino. The author has contributed to research in topics: Business Process Model and Notation & Formal semantics (linguistics). The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 9 publications receiving 47 citations.

Animating Multiple Instances in BPMN Collaborations: From Formal Semantics to Tool Support

Abstract: The increasing adoption of modelling methods contributes to a better understanding of the flow of processes, from the internal behaviour of a single organisation to a wider perspective where several organisations exchange messages. In this regard, BPMN collaboration is a suitable modelling abstraction. Even if this is a widely accepted notation, only a limited effort has been expended in formalising its semantics, especially for what it concerns the interplay among control features, data handling and exchange of messages in scenarios requiring multiple instances of interacting participants. In this paper, we face the problem of providing a formal semantics for BPMN collaborations including multiple instances, while taking into account the data perspective. Beyond defining a novel formalisation, we also provide a BPMN collaboration animator tool faithfully implementing the formal semantics. Its visualisation facilities support designers in debugging multi-instance collaboration models.

Global vs. local semantics of BPMN 2.0 OR-join

Abstract: Nowadays, BPMN 2.0 has acquired a clear predominance for modelling business processes. However, one of its drawback is the lack of a formal semantics, that leads to different interpretations, and hence implementations, of some of its features. This, as a matter of fact, results on process implementations using such features that do not fit with designers expectations, and that are not portable from one BPMN enactment tools to another. Among the BPMN elements particular ambiguous is the semantics of the OR-Join. Several formalisations of this element have been proposed in the literature, but none of them is derived from a direct and faithful translation of the current version of BPMN standard. In this work we instead provide direct, global and local, formalisations compliant with the OR-Join semantics reported in the BPMN 2.0 standard. In particular, the local semantics is devised to more efficiently determine the OR-Join enablement. The soundness of the approach is given by demonstrating the correspondence of the local semantics with respect to the global one.

A Classification of BPMN Collaborations based on Safeness and Soundness Notions

Abstract: BPMN 2.0 standard has a huge uptake in modelling business processes within the same organisation or collaborations involving multiple interacting participants. It results that providing a solid foundation to enable BPMN designers to understand their models in a consistent way is becoming more and more important. In our investigation we define and exploit a formal characterisation of the collaborations' semantics, specifically and directly given for BPMN models, to provide a classification of BPMN collaborations. In particular, we refer to collaborations involving processes with arbitrary topology, thus overcoming the well-structuredness limitations. The proposed classification is based on some of the most important correctness properties in the business process domain, namely safeness and soundness. We prove, with a uniform formal framework, some conjectured and expected results and, most of all, we achieve novel results for BPMN collaborations concerning the relationships between safeness and soundness, and their compositionality, that represent major advances in the state-of-the-art.

Animating Multiple Instances in BPMN Collaborations: From Formal Semantics to Tool Support

Abstract: The increasing adoption of modelling methods contributes to a better understanding of the flow of processes, from the internal behaviour of a single organisation to a wider perspective where several organisations exchange messages. In this regard, BPMN collaboration is a suitable modelling abstraction. Even if this is a widely accepted notation, only a limited effort has been expended in formalising its semantics, especially for what it concerns the interplay among control features, data handling and exchange of messages in scenarios requiring multiple instances of interacting participants. In this paper, we face the problem of providing a formal semantics for BPMN collaborations including multiple instances, while taking into account the data perspective. Beyond defining a novel formalisation, we also provide a BPMN collaboration animator tool faithfully implementing the formal semantics. Its visualisation facilities support designers in debugging multi-instance collaboration models.