Abstract
Process models are designed to describe the required tasks to achieve a desired business goal. These models can be verified to be compliant with additional requirements, like regulations and business requirements. This means that process models can be designed and verified to behave according to some desired requirements. However, it is possible that some of the outcomes at runtime deviate from the design predictions of the model, which would render the model and the compliance verification obsolete. In this paper, we propose an approach aiming at detecting such runtime deviations through representing the tasks’ outcomes as data ranges. When a deviation is detected, the approach re-evaluates compliance of the model given the unexpected outcomes during the execution, and if necessary and possible it adapts the remainder of the model’s execution to preemptively avoid breaching the requirements.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
We intentionally keep the definition of the base components of the problem abstract, as this allows the paper to focus on discussing the core issue: detecting and repairing runtime deviations in process models. As an additional bonus, using abstract descriptions to define the base components gives the proposed approach the flexibility to be applied to components fitting the features required by these abstract descriptions.
- 2.
Note that obligations are not limited to represent and model regulatory requirements. For instance, an organisation could model the production requirements that a process must fulfil in each of its executions as obligations.
- 3.
In practical scenarios it can be considered that the amount of possible executions of a model to be evaluated to be tractable. However, it must be taken into account that when heavy parallelisation is used, then the number of possible executions can become to large to be evaluated successfully.
- 4.
We would like to point out that it is still possible to have obligations whose components’ verification is complex and can be associated to some more convoluted logics, however for the sake of clarity and simplicity we disregard these borderline cases in the present paper.
- 5.
Note that some more complex types of obligations may have their elements relate to the state of other obligations, such as for instance compensations, where the trigger of that kind of obligation corresponds to the violation of another. However, when these related obligations are organised in sequences and do not have circular relations, the verification procedure can still independently evaluate such sequences of related obligations and later aggregate the results.
- 6.
Given the running partial execution \(\epsilon _p\) of P, the associated remainder process \(P'\) represents with its possible executions the possible continuations of \(\epsilon _p\) as determined in P.
- 7.
Any technique used to check compliance of the original process can be reused to verify compliance for the remainder process.
- 8.
The reparation problem presents many similarities with the constraint satisfaction problems, which can be described as the problems of finding the values assignments of some variables such that the resulting state satisfies some given constraints.
- 9.
For simplicity, we consider as the measure of the alteration only the cardinality of the set of variables altered, and not the magnitude. However, both measures should be considered when deciding which alteration is the least impacting on the current behaviour, and we plan to investigate this in our future research.
- 10.
Note that this does not refer to a particular compliance checking approach, but any approach satisfying the properties described in Sect. 4.1 can be used.
- 11.
We do not provide a detailed definition for the procedure identifying the possible repair options given a violation resulting from a behavioural deviation. While this is definitely an interesting problem that we plan to tackle in our future research, it can be considered an orthogonal problem and to minimise the scope of the paper we keep the focus on the main procedure, while assuming this auxiliary procedure as given for now.
- 12.
That is, we consider the smallest cardinality and when multiple options are still available, the order used in Definition 9 is used to further reduce the amount of candidates.
- 13.
This can be the case where deviations during an execution leads to a large amount of failures for many obligations governing the model. More general cases would be represented by small deviations leading to a few violations that can be then resolved by iterating the approach a limited number of times.
References
Aalst, W.. M.. P..: Verification of workflow nets. In: Azéma, Pierre, Balbo, Gianfranco (eds.) ICATPN 1997. LNCS, vol. 1248, pp. 407–426. Springer, Heidelberg (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63139-9_48
van der Aalst, W.M.P., Adriansyah, A., van Dongen, B.: Replaying history on process models for conformance checking and performance analysis. Wiley Interdisciplinary Rev. Data Mining Knowl. Discovery 2(2), 182–192 (2012)
Armas Cervantes, Abel, van Beest, Nick R. T. P.., La Rosa, Marcello, Dumas, Marlon, García-Bañuelos, Luciano: Interactive and incremental business process model repair. In: Panetto, Hervé, Debruyne, Christophe, Gaaloul, Walid, Papazoglou, Mike, Paschke, Adrian, Ardagna, Claudio Agostino, Meersman, Robert (eds.) OTM 2017. LNCS, vol. 10573, pp. 53–74. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69462-7_5
Bagheri Hariri, B., Calvanese, D., De Giacomo, G., Deutsch, A., Montali, M.: Verification of relational data-centric dynamic systems with external services. In: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, pp. 163–174. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2013)
van Beest, N.R.T.P., Kaldeli, E., Bulanov, P., Wortmann, J.C., Lazovik, A.: Automated runtime repair of business processes. Inf. Syst. 39, 45–79 (2014)
Carmona, J., van Dongen, B.F., Solti, A., Weidlich, M.: Conformance Checking-Relating Processes and Models. Springer International Publishing (2018)
García-Bañuelos, L., Van Beest, N.R.T.P., Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mertens, W.: Complete and interpretable conformance checking of business processes. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 44(3), 262–290 (2017)
Governatori, G.: A short introduction to the regorous compliance by design methodology. In: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Technologies for Regulatory Compliance co-located with the 30th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX). CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 2049, pp. 7–13 (2017)
Groefsema, H., van Beest, N.R.T.P., Armas-Cervantes, A.: Efficient conditional compliance checking of business process models. Comput. Ind. 115, 103181 (2020)
Groefsema, H., van Beest, N.R.T.P., Aiello, M.: A formal model for compliance verification of service compositions. IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput. 11(3), 466–479 (2018)
Groefsema, H., van Beest, N.R., Aiello, M.: A formal model for compliance verification of service compositions. IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput. 11(3), 466–479 (2016)
Hashmi, M., Governatori, G., Lam, H.-P., Wynn, M.T.: Are we done with business process compliance: state of the art and challenges ahead. Knowl. Inf. Syst. 57(1), 79–133 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-017-1142-1
Knuplesch, D., Ly, L.T., Rinderle-Ma, S., Pfeifer, H., Dadam, P.: On enabling data-aware compliance checking of business process models. In: Parsons, J., Saeki, M., Shoval, P., Woo, C., Wand, Y. (eds.) ER 2010. LNCS, vol. 6412, pp. 332–346. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16373-9_24
Maggi, Fabrizio Maria, Marrella, Andrea, Capezzuto, Giuseppe, Cervantes, Abel Armas: Explaining non-compliance of business process models through automated planning. In: Pahl, Claus, Vukovic, Maja, Yin, Jianwei, Yu, Qi. (eds.) ICSOC 2018. LNCS, vol. 11236, pp. 181–197. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03596-9_12
Marrella, Andrea: What automated planning can do for business process management. In: Teniente, Ernest, Weidlich, Matthias (eds.) What automated planning can do for business process management. LNBIP, vol. 308, pp. 7–19. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74030-0_1
Marrella, A.: Automated planning for business process management. J. Data Semantics 8(2), 79–98 (2019)
Pesic, M., Schonenberg, H., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Declare: full support for loosely-structured processes. In: IEEE EDOC, pp. 287–287 (2007)
Polyvyanyy, A., van der Aalst, W.M.P., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Wynn, M.T.: Impact-driven process model repair. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 25(4), 1–60 (2016)
Sadiq, Shazia, Governatori, Guido, Namiri, Kioumars: Modeling control objectives for business process compliance. In: Alonso, Gustavo, Dadam, Peter, Rosemann, Michael (eds.) BPM 2007. LNCS, vol. 4714, pp. 149–164. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75183-0_12
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Colombo Tosatto, S., van Beest, N. (2022). Dealing with Unexpected Runtime Outcomes Within Process Models. In: Di Ciccio, C., Dijkman, R., del Río Ortega, A., Rinderle-Ma, S. (eds) Business Process Management Forum. BPM 2022. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 458. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16171-1_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16171-1_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-16170-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-16171-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)