Conformance checking of processes based on monitoring real behavior

Business Process Management (BPM) research resulted in a plethora of methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. This survey aims to structure these results and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in BPM. In BPM the concept of a process model is fundamental. Process models may be used to configure information systems, but may also be used to analyze, understand, and improve the processes they describe. Hence, the introduction of BPM technology has both managerial and technical ramifications and may enable significant productivity improvements, cost savings, and flow-time reductions. The practical relevance of BPM and rapid developments over the last decade justify a comprehensive survey.

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Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey

The Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a standard for capturing business processes in the early phases of systems development. The mix of constructs found in BPMN makes it possible to create models with semantic errors. Such errors are especially serious, because errors in the early phases of systems development are among the most costly and hardest to correct. The ability to statically check the semantic correctness of models is thus a desirable feature for modelling tools based on BPMN. Accordingly, this paper proposes a mapping from BPMN to a formal language, namely Petri nets, for which efficient analysis techniques are available. The proposed mapping has been implemented as a tool that, in conjunction with existing Petri net-based tools, enables the static analysis of BPMN models. The formalisation also led to the identification of deficiencies in the BPMN standard specification.

/pdf/semantics-and-analysis-of-business-process-models-in-bpmn-1opylwzudv.pdf

Semantics and analysis of business process models in BPMN

Web service composition refers to the creation of new (Web) services by combination of functionality provided by existing ones. This paradigm has gained significant attention in the Web services community and is seen as a pillar for building service-oriented applications. A number of domain-specific languages for service composition have been proposed with consensus being formed around a process-oriented language known as WS-BPEL (or BPEL). The kernel of BPEL consists of simple communication primitives that may be combined using control-flow constructs expressing sequence, branching, parallelism, synchronisation, etc. As a result, BPEL process definitions lend themselves to static flow-based analysis techniques. In this report, we describe a tool that performs two useful types of static checks and extracts meta-data to optimise dynamic resource management. The tool operates by translating BPEL processes into Petri nets and exploiting existing Petri net analysis techniques. It relies on a comprehensive and rigorously defined mapping of BPEL constructs into Petri net structures.

Formal semantics and analysis of control flow in WS-BPEL

In this paper we examine the suitability of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) for business process modelling, using the Workflow Patterns as an evaluation framework. The Workflow Patterns are a collection of patterns developed for assessing control-flow, data and resource capabilities in the area of Process Aware Information Systems (PAISs). In doing so, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the capabilities of BPMN, and its strengths and weaknesses when utilised for business process modelling. The analysis provided for BPMN is part of a larger effort aiming at an unbiased and vendor-independent survey of the suitability and the expressive power of some mainstream process modelling languages. It is a sequel to previous work in which languages including BPEL and UML Activity Diagrams were evaluated.

/pdf/on-the-suitability-of-bpmn-for-business-process-modelling-1xx7osdbuv.pdf

On the suitability of BPMN for business process modelling

http://bpmcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/reports/2005/BPM-05-13.pdf

The Business Process Execution Language for Web Service, known as BPEL4WS, more recently as WS-BPEL (or BPEL for short) [1], is a process definition language geared towards Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) and layered on top of the Web services technology stack. In BPEL, the logic of the interactions between a given service and its environment is described as a composition of communication actions. These communication actions are interrelated by control-flow dependencies expressed through constructs close to those found in workflow definition languages. In particular, BPEL incorporates two sophisticated branching and synchronisation constructs, namely “control links” and “join conditions”, which can be found in a class of workflow models known as synchronising workflows formalised in terms of Petri nets in [3].

/pdf/wofbpel-a-tool-for-automated-analysis-of-bpel-processes-gb2g2lpwtu.pdf

WofBPEL: a tool for automated analysis of BPEL processes

Standardisation of languages in the field of business process management has long been an elusive goal. Recently though, consensus has built around one process implementation language, namely BPEL, and two fundamentally similar process modelling notations, namely UML Activity Diagram (UML AD) and BPMN. This paper presents a technique for generating BPEL code from process models expressed in a core subset of BPMN and UML AD. This model-to-code translation is a necessary ingredient to the emergence of model-driven business process development environments based on these standards. The proposed translation has been implemented as an open source tool.

Translating standard process models to BPEL

/pdf/translating-standard-process-models-to-bpel-2dtpybads7.pdf

Stephan Breutel

Papers

Formal semantics and analysis of control flow in WS-BPEL

Formal semantics and analysis of control flow in WS-BPEL

WofBPEL: a tool for automated analysis of BPEL processes

Translating standard process models to BPEL

Translating standard process models to BPEL