Abstract
Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), developed by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), intends to bridge the gap between business process design and implementation. However, the specification of the notation does not include a formal semantics. This paper shows how a subset of the BPMN can be given a process semantics in Communicating Sequential Processes. Such a semantics allows developers to formally analyse and compare BPMN diagrams. A simple example of a business process is included to demonstrate the application of the semantics; some theoretical results about the semantics are briefly discussed.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bolton, C., Davies, J.: Activity graphs and processes. In: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Integrated Formal Methods, pp. 77–96 (2000)
Business Process Execution Language for Web Services, Version 1.1 (May 2003), http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-bpel
Butler, M., Hoare, T., Ferreira, C.: A trace semantics for long-running transactions. In: Abdallah, A.E., Jones, C.B., Sanders, J.W. (eds.) Communicating Sequential Processes. LNCS, vol. 3525. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Dijkman, R.M.: Choreography-Based Design of Business Collaborations. BETA Working Paper WP-181, Eindhoven University of Technology (2006)
Dijkman, R.M., Dumas, M., Ouyang, C.: Formal semantics and automated analysis of BPMN process models. Technical Report Preprint 5969, Queensland University of Technology (2007)
Dwyer, M.B., Avrunin, G.S., Corbett, J.C.: Property Specification Patterns for Finite-state Verification. In: 2nd Workshop on Formal Methods in Software Practice (1998)
Formal Systems (Europe) Ltd. Failures-Divergences Refinement, FDR2 User Manual (1998), www.fsel.com
Foster, H.: Mapping BPEL4WS to FSP. Technical report, Imperial College, London (2003)
ILOG JViews BPMN Modeler, http://www.ilog.com/
Cámara, J., Canal, C., Cubo, J., Vallecillo, A.: Formalizing WSBPEL Business Processes using Process Algebra. In: Abadi, M., de Alfaro, L. (eds.) CONCUR 2005. LNCS, vol. 3653. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Koshkina, M.: Verification of business processes for web services. Master’s thesis, York University, Toronto (October 2003)
Lucchi, R., Mazzara, M.: A pi-calculus based semantics for WS-BPEL. Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming 70(1) (January 2007)
OMG. Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) Specification (February 2006), www.bpmn.org
Ouyang, C., van der Aalst, W.M.P., Dumas, M., ter Hofstede, A.H.M.: Translating BPMN to BPEL. Technical Report BPM-06-02, BPM Center (2006)
Recker, J., Mendling, J.: On the Translation between BPMN and BPEL: Conceptual Mismatch between Process Modeling Languages. In: Proceedings 18th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, pp. 521–532 (2006)
Roscoe, A.W.: The Theory and Practice of Concurrency. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1998)
W3C. Web Service Choreography Interface (WSCI) 1.0 (November 2002), http://www.w3.org/TR/wsci
Wong, P.Y.H., Gibbons, J.: A Process Semantics for BPMN (extended version) (2007), www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/peter.wong/pub/bpmnsem.pdf
Woodcock, J.C.P., Davies, J.: Using Z: Specification, Proof and Refinement. Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science (1996)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Wong, P.Y.H., Gibbons, J. (2008). A Process Semantics for BPMN. In: Liu, S., Maibaum, T., Araki, K. (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering. ICFEM 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5256. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88194-0_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88194-0_22
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-88193-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-88194-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)