Quality of Business Processes

The aim of this field of research is the improvement of the quality of business processes through the application of modern approaches from software engineering when modeling business processes like business process patterns and model checking.

Members: Christian Gerth, Gregor Engels, Markus Luckey, Christian Soltenborn

Contact person: Gregor Engels

Description:

It is the major aim of this field of research to apply advanced methods of software engineering in the area of business process and workflow modeling.

Business processes typically have to fulfill a number of requirements and constraints resulting for example from business logic requirements, quality management, etc. These requirements determine together the actual design of a business process. In complex processes, the conformance of a business process to such requirements cannot easily be determined. Accordingly, a formal verification of conformance is wishful, yet this requires that the requirements are precisely and unambiguously defined. Approaches based on advanced mathematical concepts like temporal logic etc. are often inappropriate for many users. Hence, we have developed a visual language based on light-weight extensions of UML Activities that allows the modeling quality requirements as business process patterns. The formal definition of the Process Pattern Specification Language allows the precise and automated verification of existing business processes for conformance to quality requirements resp. the correct application of business process patterns. For this verification, at first the exact execution semantics of a business process has to be determined using a formally defined interpreter based on graph transformations and DMM. After that, the business process pattern models are translated into temporal logic and, using a model checker, it can be determined whether the modeled requirements are met by the business process.