Formal verification of BPMN diagrams in Integrated Model of Distributed Systems (IMDS)

Abstract

Business process model and notation (BPMN) is a way of describing business processes using convenient diagrams. In the last decade, it became a de-facto industry standard, widely used by software architects and business analysts to describe business requirements and the overall structure of a designed information system. Ensuring that diagrams model their intended behavior is of utmost importance for notation users. This article deals with the definition of BPMN through the conversion to the Integrated Model of Distributed Systems (IMDS) and automated verification of BPMN diagrams. The translation of a subset of BPMN preserves information about the processes in the formal model. This allows finding partial deadlocks and checking partial termination (concerning a subset of processes), verification in terms of BPMN processes, and mapping found errors onto source BPMN definition. Moreover, IMDS is tailored to model distributed systems, which is the very nature of business processes. A tool for automated translation of BPMN diagrams to IMDS, automated verification, and visualization of results is developed.