Revisiting Model-Driven Engineering for Run-Time Verification of Business Processes

Abstract

Abstract. Run-time verification has been widely advocated in the last decade as a key technique to check whether the execution of a business process and its interactions with partner services comply with the application requirements. Despite the substantial research performed in this area, there are very few approaches that leverage model-driven engineering (MDE) methodologies and integrate them in the development process of applications based on business process descriptions. In this position paper we describe our vision and present the research roadmap for adopting MDE techniques in the context of run-time verification of business processes, based on our early experience with a public service partner in the domain of eGovernment. We maintain that within this context the adoption of MDE would contribute in three ways: 1) expressing, at a logical level, complex properties to be checked at run time using a domain-specific language; 2) transforming such properties in a format that can leverage state-of-the-art, industrial-strength tools in order to check these properties; 3) integrating such property checker in run-time verification engines, specific to a target run-time platform, without user's intervention.

Model-Driven Trace Diagnostics for Pattern-based Temporal Specifications

“…TemPsy [11,17] is a pattern-based, domain-specific language for the specification of temporal properties. It has been developed based on the analysis of the requirements of various applications implementing business process models in the context of eGovernment systems [16]. The analysis established that all the requirements of the case study could be expressed as temporal properties by using the property specification patterns proposed by Dwyer et al [19], with some additional expressions.…”

“…Among the many approaches for run-time verification [4], our previous work on model-driven trace checking [17]-developed as part of a research project in collaboration with our public-service partner CTIE (Centre des technologies de l'information de l'Etat, the Luxembourg national center for information technology)-was focused on model-driven run-time verification of business processes [16]. Our approach checks properties expressed in TemPsy (Temporal Properties made easy) [11,17], a pattern-based domainspecific language for the specification of temporal requirements.…”

A Model-driven Approach to Representing and Checking RBAC Contextual Policies

“…This policy can be checked in OCL as an invariant of class Role: In this invariant, we first select the instance corresponding to user u1 (lines 3-4). We retrieve the list temporalContext of temporal contexts in which the role should be assigned to user u1 (lines 5-7) and compute, over the elements of this list, the list timeE of time expressions assigned to them (lines [8][9][10][11]. In this example, the list timeE will include a TimeExpression with an unbounded TimeInterval whose start TimePoint corresponds to "July 10, 2014 at 16:00".…”

A Model-Driven Approach to Trace Checking of Pattern-Based Temporal Properties

“…As part of a larger research collaborative project that we are running with our public service partner CTIE (Centre des technologies de l'information de l'Etat, the Luxembourg national center for information technology), on model-driven run-time verification of business processes [3], we are investigating the use of trace checking for detecting anomalous behaviors of eGovernment business processes and for checking whether third-parties (e.g., other administrations, suppliers) involved in the execution of the process fulfill their guarantees.…”