Luis E

Bio: Luis E is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Model checking & Formal verification. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 9 citations.

Business Process Verification: The Application of Model Checking and Timed Automata

Abstract: The most important result to standardize the notation for graphical representation of Business Processes (BPs) is the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). Despite the BPs modeled with BPMN being able to support business designers, BPMN models are not appropriate to support the analysis phase. BPMN models have no formal semantics to conduct qualitative analysis (validation and verification). In this work is presented how Model Checking (MC) verification technique for software and Timed Automata (TA) formal language are integrated within a formal verification approach to check BPs modeled with BPMN. Also, are introduced a set of guideline to transform BPMN models into TA. The use of our approach allow to business analysts and designers to perform evaluation (i.e., qualitative analysis) of BPs, based on the formal specification of BP–task model with TA. The application of the approach is aimed to evaluate the behavior of the BP–task model with respect to business performance indicators (for instance, service time, waiting time or queue size) derived from business needs, as is shown in an instance of an enterprise–project related to Customer Relationship Management.

Transformation of the BPMN Design Model into a Colored Petri Net Using the Partitioning Approach

Abstract: Formal verification is a process to ensure that the business process model and notation (BPMN) design model is free of deadlock, livelock, and other undesirable properties that can cause a system crash. Formal verification is a complicated procedure involving model abstraction and model checking tools used for property checking. There are several existing transformation techniques that yield an abstract model, but the data perspective is not considered. These techniques are also inappropriate for the large-scale BPMN design model. An automated transformation can reduce the flaws, time consumption, and complexity of the large-scale BPMN design model. This paper proposes a transformation technique and provides a framework for transforming the BPMN design models into colored Petri nets (CPNs). Our techniques cover both the control-flow and data-flow perspectives. The partitioning technique of the BPMN design model is applied to reduce the complexity and leads to a CPN model that can support the hierarchical and compositional verification techniques that are suitable for the large-scale BPMN design models. The proposed transformation has been implemented as a transformation framework and is able to consistently transform the BPMN design models into CPN models.

A systematic literature review on compliance requirements management of business processes

Abstract: One crucial aspect that had cost business organizations so much is management of compliance requirements from various regulatory sources. In a bid to avoid being penalized, some organizations have adopted various techniques to accomplish this task. However, literature revealed that few thorough reviews have been centered on this subject in a systematic way. This implies that a review that systematically captured the entire crucial elements such as implementation environment, constraints types addressed, main contributions and strengths of the existing techniques is missing. This has led to the lack of sufficiently good context of operation. A systematic review on existing literatures is presented in this paper, which focuses on the management of business process compliance requirements in order to present summarized evidences and provide a lead-up for appropriately positioning new research activities. The guideline for conducting systematic literature review in software engineering by Kitchenham was employed in carrying out the systematic review as well as a review planning template to execute the review. Results showed that control flow and data flow requirements have been addressed most in recent time. The temporal and resource allocation requirements have been under researched. The approaches that have been employed in business process compliance requirements management are model checking, patterns, semantic, formal, ontology, goal-based requirements analysis and network analysis. The traditional business environment has been put into consideration more than the cloud environment. The summary of research contributions revealed that the approaches have been more of formal techniques compared to model checking and semantics. This shows that there is a need for more research on business process compliance that will be centered on the cloud environment. Researchers will be able to suggest the technique to be adopted based on the combined importance of each criterion that was defined in this work.

Overview of verification tools for business process models

Abstract: Formal verification of process models is an important issue in Business Process Management. Such a verification provides the information about the correctness of a process model, can be also used for checking business compliance or as a preliminary step to simulation. In this paper, we provide an overview of the existing tools for such a verification.

Verification of Event-Driven Process Chain with Timed Automata and Time Petri Nets

Abstract: Event-driven Process Chain (EPC) is a known business process modeling language which is primarily renowned for efficient modeling of business requirements It is a semi-formal modeling language which is commonly verified though various formal mechanism for simple atomic events However, the complexity of business requirements cannot be modeled through EPC atomic events alone especially in case of real time systems Therefore, the complex events patterns like Event Time, Event location, Event Cardinality, Event Sequence, Event Exclusion, Event Trend and Data dependency are introduced in EPC from the novel area of complex event processing However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no mechanism available in EPC to model and verify such complex events Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the verification possibilities of both (atomic and complex) events in the context of Timed-Automata (TA) and Time Petri Nets (TPN) Particularly, we try to map the semantics of simple and complex events with the corresponding concepts of TA and TPN It is analyzed that the simple EPC events can be formalized through TA and TPN but limited support is available for complex events The restaurant process case study has been used for further investigation of complex events It has been concluded that TA formalism is more suitable than TPN for the verification of complex events in EPC

Towards a compliance requirement management for SMSEs: a model and architecture

Abstract: Today’s business entities face an ever-growing number of laws and regulations due to recent high profile business scandals and failures. Small and medium scale enterprises (SMSE) in developing countries do not have an efficient compliance checking mechanism to make their business processes compliant with these regulatory standards. This checking mechanism is needed to give the enterprises full assurance of complete adherence to regulatory standards, bodies, or Service Level Agreements. Therefore, a structured and efficient compliance management model is needed to aid SMSE in launching their businesses safely and to ensure business processes fit into the classical regulatory standards. This paper presents a business rules compliance checking model and architecture for SMSEs in developing countries to verify and monitor their business process models at design time and at run time. It involves a systematic compliance requirements classification and analysis that employs a goal based requirement engineering approach prior to design time verification. It also introduces the idea and demonstration of network analysis for runtime business processes monitoring. The business process model will be verified at design time using a Simple PROMELA Interpreter model checker through Linear Temporal Logic rules. The approaches were tested on a financial institution in Nigeria, a developing nation in Africa at the time of this research. In order to ensure that the choice of the requirements analysis approach was efficient, a number of standard metrics for evaluating requirements engineering techniques were used and promising results were obtained. We also carried out a comparative analysis of the proposed approach in this paper with the approaches of previous research papers. This approach proved to be effective in terms of clarity, simplicity, flexibility and expressiveness while reducing incomplete adherence of business processes and enhancing the correctness of the business process.