A scenario-based verification technique to assess the compatibility of collaborative business processes

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Abstract

Successful E-Business is based on seamless collaborative business processes. Each partner in the collaboration specifies its own rules and interaction preconditions. The verification of the compatibility of collaborative business processes, based on local and global views, is a complex task, which is critical for the success of the cooperation. The verification of process compatibility should be a key element in the design of new business alliances, which makes this verification essential in inter-organizational business process design. The advent of Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures stresses the need to solve complex business cooperations under the pressure of reduced costs and risks, combined with shorter time to market. At the same time, the message-based paradigm results in large and complex processes which makes the verification process quite hard.

First the use of an atomic business activity based interaction paradigm is proposed to reduce the complexity of collaborative process models. Next, formal compatibility criteria for business processes are developed. The key construction is the notion of semantic compatibility, which can be used to assess the compatibility of the publicly exposed behavior (a.k.a. business interfaces) between business partners in joint business processes. The formal nature of this compatibility allows to give a precise indication of the degree of compatibility between cooperating business partners. It enables exhaustive lists of incompatible (i.e. unsupported scenarios) business cooperations, which is more comprehensive and complete than the typical compatible or incompatible answer to this question. Finally, complex multiple party interactions can be examined in terms of the safety of the interaction protocols.

Introduction

The advent of the service oriented architecture (SOA) [71], where services are the key entities populating future information processing architectures, has important implications that reach far beyond classical software engineering. The fact that services will be conceptualized, implemented, and integrated with different services in possibly multiple locations and should still be able to interact seamlessly, brings about important interoperability issues on both business and technical levels.

Developing automated verification procedures and appropriate analysis techniques will be a major driving force to a smooth(er) adoption of this new software paradigm [14], [20], [4], [60]. Verification of collaborative business processes has some important economic impact as well, as services and more specifically their composition in collaborative business processes will be the foundation of future software products as well as Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi) scenarios. Interoperability at the data and process level becomes a critical issue in these integration scenarios.

In this paper, the focus is on the development of a collaborative business process verification technique which results in a detailed assessment report on the compatibility of the partner processes. For the moment the verification approach is limited to checking process level incompatibilities only, data aspects being subject of further research. The presented verification technique is mainly motivated by the fact that many analysis techniques are mostly based on low-level process definitions and that they reduce the compatibility issue to a simple yes–no problem [55], [28], [53]. To reduce the complexity of the models to be verified, this paper first proposes an approach for modeling collaborative business processes that hides the micro-level coordination and allows focusing on high-level units of collaboration. Then the paper proposes a Petri Net based verification technique for these high-level process definitions and puts forward a strict formal compatibility criterion, which identifies four levels of semantic compatibility: complete, strong, one-way strong and weak. These (in)compatibility types can be used to create detailed reports on the compatibility between the parties of a collaborative business process. Such an analysis report should not only answer the compatibility question (compatible or not), it should also give detailed information about the reasons of the incompatibility (why are they incompatible?), the degree of the compatibility (how bad is it?) and provide an overview of the differences between the processes (which scenarios are supported and which are not?).

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. First, in Section 2, the basics of collaborative business process modeling are briefly explained. Some problems concerning message-based business process modeling are also elaborated on in Section 2. Section 3 discusses a new interaction paradigm for collaborative business processes based on atomic business activities. This approach is then used in Section 4 where we introduce an efficient and complete verification technique based on the notion of semantic compatibility. In Section 5, the details of the verification algorithms are discussed. Section 6 is devoted to the discussion of related work both concerning the process modeling approach and verification techniques. In Section 7, the conclusions of the paper are discussed and some issues for further research are identified.

Section snippets

Message-based collaborative process modeling approaches

Many techniques, approaches and languages have been put forward to model collaborative business processes. Some of these techniques were particularly developed for the business processing modeling discipline, such as BPMN [76], [78], BPEL [1], EPC [44]. Some evolved or emerged from other conceptual modeling areas, such as finite state machines [36], [16], activity diagrams [58], Π-calculus [56] and Petri Nets [62]. Very often there is an emphasis on implementation aspects, especially when

Interaction through atomic business activities

The disadvantages of using message-based modeling techniques have been discussed in the previous section. In this section, we propose to alleviate the problems associated with the message-based interaction paradigm by using a gate-based multi-party interaction paradigm with conjunctive parallelism and a fixed set of participants [42].

The verification of collaborative business processes

The remainder of the paper is devoted to the explanation of a Petri Net language based verification technique for collaborative business processes. First of all, a short introduction to Petri Net theory and Petri Net languages is presented. Next, different compatibility types are introduced as a measure of to which degree process components in collaborative business processes are (in)consistent. It is shown how these consistency measures can be verified by means of Petri Net languages. Next,

Automating semantic compatibility verification

Checking semantic compatibility in collaborative business processes is a complex exercise which involves multiple steps. In this section, the results that have been presented so far will be shown to be a two-step process. First of all, all partners are verified in their binary interactions, i.e. whenever two partners have common activities they will be checked for consistency. Next, all partners are confronted with the global behavior of the collaboration by checking it on a one-versus-all

Related work

Today, the BPM market has been overwhelmed by a number of different BPM products which are focused on the design and enactment of business process models. Other important aspects such as verification, validation, simulation and performance analysis are only weakly supported. Often, the type of verification offered by these products is limited to a syntax check and does not consider behavioral (semantic) aspects, by examining potential deadlocks or livelocks.

The execution of collaborative

Conclusion and further research

Collaborative business processes will be the foundation of future software products as well as B2Bi scenarios. Therefore, efficient modeling, verification and analysis techniques are essential in current and future software engineering methodologies. In this paper, a motivation was given why many of the current business process modeling languages and techniques are too low-level (message-based) to model business processes. High-level business processes can and should be verified and analyzed to

Acknowledgements

This research was part of a project funded by the Research Fund K.U. Leuven (OT 05/07) and (IOF-HB/07/022), whose support is gratefully acknowledged.

Manu De Backer holds a Ph.D. in applied economic sciences from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is an associate professor in the Department of Management Information Systems of the University of Antwerp and a lecturer at the Hogeschool Gent. He also holds a research position at the K.U. Leuven. His research focuses on the verification of business process models and the consistency and integration of business process models with other conceptual models. Other research interests are data mining

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    Manu De Backer holds a Ph.D. in applied economic sciences from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is an associate professor in the Department of Management Information Systems of the University of Antwerp and a lecturer at the Hogeschool Gent. He also holds a research position at the K.U. Leuven. His research focuses on the verification of business process models and the consistency and integration of business process models with other conceptual models. Other research interests are data mining with ACO and BPMN.

    Monique Snoeck holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. She is full professor in the Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management of the Faculty of Business and Economics of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and visiting professor at the Facultés Universitaires Notre Dame de la Paix, Namur. Her research focuses on conceptual modeling, requirements engineering, software architecture, model-driven engineering and business process management.

    Geert Monsieur is a Ph.D. student in the Leuven Institute for Research on Information Systems (LIRIS) of the Faculty of Business and Economics at the K.U. Leuven. He holds a Master in Computer Science degree from the K.U. Leuven. His research is mainly about mastering the complexity of business process implementations in a service-oriented environment. Other research interests include topics like web services, model-driven development and event-driven architectures.

    Wilfried Lemahieu holds a Ph.D. in applied economic sciences from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. At present, he is associate professor in the Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management of the same university. He conducts research in software engineering, business process management, database management and web based systems. He is also co-founder and board member of the BPM-Forum Belgium.

    Guido Dedene has a Ph.D. in Sciences (Mathematics), which he received at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U. Leuven, Belgium). He is a full professor in Management Informatics at the K.U. Leuven (Faculty of Economics and Business) and a professor in Development of Information and Communication Systems at the University of Amsterdam Business School. His teaching activities focus on Methods and Techniques of Information & Communication Systems Development, the Economics of Information & Communication Services, and the Management of Information & Communication Technology. His research includes the Model-driven Development of Information & Communication Systems and Quantitative Management Models for Information & Communication Technology and Systems. He is a board member for several IT-Innovation related organizations, and coordinates for more than 10 years the Industry Fellows Programme of the Faculty of Economics and Business at K.U. Leuven.

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