Analyzing behavioral properties of semantic business processes with parametric data

Abstract

SUMMARYOne of the basic problems in (semantic) business process management concerns the behavioral analysis at design time so that only correct processes are exposed. Although this analysis requires the semantic propagation of data and system preconditions through processes and between processes to be considered, some concrete data are usually obtained at runtime and cannot be used in early process development phases. This paper proposes Parametric Unary RDF Annotated Petri Net Systems (P-U-RDF-PN Systems) as a formalism to alleviate this problem. The formalism allows analyzing behavioral properties of semantic business processes at design time. Parametric values are used to represent the data that will be obtained at runtime, allowing to also consider them in the analysis phase. The paper formally defines the semantics of the formalism in terms of enabling and firing of transitions as well as the concept of reachability graph. It also presents how to compute and analyze this parametric reachability graph. The analysis is based on an adaption of model checking techniques, being temporal logic the formalism used to specify the system properties to be analyzed. Finally, an implementation prototype using RDF and SPARQL tools and a Satisfiability Modulo Theories solver is presented, with some experiments evaluating how scalable the prototype is.

Hierarchy Modeling and Formal Verification of Emergency Treatment Processes

“…The main difficulty lies in the derivation of task dependences from BPMN models or WF-nets. In addition, tasks are specified using inputs, outputs, preconditions, and postconditions in [23], which is consistent with semantic service specification such as OWL-S or WSMO. Learning from this point, we will add preconditions and postconditions for tasks when we turn to develop an executable process model in the future.…”

“…Unfortunately, the reachability or liveness analysis of Petri nets has no effective algorithms [18]. Several kinds of Petri nets extended with semantic information have been presented [19]- [23]. Reference [19] introduced the time recursive ECATNets for modeling and analysis of time-constrained flexible workflows, in which conditions with semantic information are associated with flows and transitions.…”

“…Compared to the related work [15], [19]- [23], the main differences of our approach include the following: 1) Synchronizers are introduced to model the synchronization mechanism of a process. The process logic net obtained based on synchronizers is more concise and has a high expressivity.…”

“…However, the modeling and verification method needs that the process logic model is well formed. The parametric unary RDF annotated Petri net systems (P-U-RDF-PN systems) is proposed in [23] as formalism with formal semantics to model and analyze semantic business processes. However, the workflow logic in P-U-RDF-PN systems is modeled by elementary Petri net whose scale will expand rapidly when processes are sensitive to attribute values [23].…”