Quantifying Consistency between Conceptual and Executable Business Processes

Abstract

Business processes have been identified as effective means to developing service-based applications. It is an important and challenging research problem to check consistency between conceptual and executable business processes. Most existing approaches analyze the consistency based on qualitative equivalence relations between business processes and only provide a "true"/"false" result. Thus, they fail to differentiate slight inconsistency scenarios from totally inconsistency ones. To address this problem, we leverage activity constraints, i.e., partial orders, mutual-exclusions, and independences, to analyze consistency; and measure the consistency degree (ranging from 0 to 1.0) between a conceptual business process and an executable one based on the rate of consistent activity constraints. We show the applicability of our approach by analyzing the consistency between public views and private processes of some real-life BPEL processes.

Coco

“…According to the calculating formula of each consistency degree (cf. [5], [8]), we can obtain the consistency degree which keeps two decimal fractions.  View: the UI of COCO uses the java swing library.…”

“…The activity constraints which reveal the essential activity relations in process are partial order, mutual-exclusion and independence [5,8].…”

“…The main idea of the COCO method is to obtain the consistency degree between two processes based on the rate of their consistent activity constraints [5,8]. For two aligned executable processes, their consistency degree is defined as:…”

“…Also, we have proposed a novel method to measure the consistency between the conceptual and executable business processes [5]. Our approach considers both control and data aspects of processes.…”