Weak Conformance between Process Models and Synchronized Object Life Cycles

Abstract

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen NationalbibliothekDie Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de/ abrufbar. Process models specify behavioral execution constraints between activities as well as between activities and data objects. A data object is characterized by its states and state transitions represented as object life cycle. For process execution, all behavioral execution constraints must be correct. Correctness can be verified via soundness checking which currently only considers control flow information. For data correctness, conformance between a process model and its object life cycles is checked. Current approaches abstract from dependencies between multiple data objects and require fully specified process models although, in real-world process repositories, often underspecified models are found. Coping with these issues, we introduce the concept of synchronized object life cycles and we define a mapping of data constraints of a process model to Petri nets extending an existing mapping. Further, we apply the notion of weak conformance to process models to tell whether each time an activity needs to access a data object in a particular state, it is guaranteed that the data object is in or can reach the expected state. Then, we introduce an algorithm for an integrated verification of control flow correctness and weak data conformance using soundness checking. Universitätsverlag 5

Improving business process intelligence by observing object state transitions

“…As an example, we refer to our treatment process described in Section 2 and shown in Fig. 1. (iii) Furthermore, conformance between process models that utilize data objects and the corresponding organization-wide object life cycles is required ensuring data-compliant and deadlock-free execution of processes [12,24,25].…”

“…Finally, we also assume that the process model only utilizes object state transitions comprised in the object life cycle, i.e., the combination of process model and object life cycles fulfill the notion of weak conformance [12]. The object life cycle may contain object states and transitions not utilized in the process model.…”

Automating data exchange in process choreographies

“…The main challenge is to ensure that all reads and writes of data objects in a process model are covered by some specified data state transitions in the object life cycles. Checking this property is out of scope for this paper but will be discussed in detail in [22], since we concentrate on checking internal dependencies in this paper. Summarized, [22] maps the local process model to a Petri net containing detailed information about data access from activities and checks for soundness following the standard approach of checking behaviorally correctness.…”

“…In addition to the modeling technique and code generation, we introduce a set of approaches required to check and ensure correctness of the modeled process choreography to achieve a successful interaction between all participants during execution. We utilize multiple approaches from the literature, especially for the control flow parts of the choreography and the ordering of messages (e.g., soundness checking [21] and realizability [13]) but also for data flow correctness (e.g., weak conformance [22]), and describe some new means regarding, for instance, message definition and sufficient data modeling.…”

A Connection of Task-centric with Artefact-centric Models through Semantic Task Specification and its Use for Formal Verification

“…Meyer et al [10] define a "weak conformance" between process models and synchronized object life cycles. Their algorithm for soundness checking verifies whether each time an activity needs to access a data object in a particular state, it is guaranteed that the data object is in or can reach the expected state.…”