Regulatory compliance of business operations is a critical problem for enterprises. As enterprises increasingly use business process management systems to automate their business processes, technologies to automatically check the compliance of process models against compliance rules are becoming important. In this paper, we present a method to improve the reliability and minimize the risk of failure of business process management systems from a compliance perspective. The proposed method allows separate modeling of both process models and compliance concerns. Business process models expressed in the Business Process Execution Language are transformed into pi-calculus and then into finite state machines. Compliance rules captured in the graphical Business Property Specification Language are translated into linear temporal logic. Thus, process models can be verified against these compliance rules by means of model-checking technology. The benefit of our method is threefold: Through the automated verification of a large set of business process models, our approach increases deployment efficiency and lowers the risk of installing noncompliant processes; it reduces the cost associated with inspecting business process models for compliance; and compliance checking may ensure compliance of new process models before their execution and thereby increase the reliability of business operations in general.

A service-oriented system is composed of independent software units, namely services, that interact with one another exclusively through message exchanges. The proper functioning of such system depends on whether or not each individual service behaves as the other services expect it to behave. Since services may be developed and operated independently, it is unrealistic to assume that this is always the case. This paper addresses the problem of checking and quantifying how much the actual behavior of a service, as recorded in message logs, conforms to the expected behavior as specified in a process model. We consider the case where the expected behavior is defined using the BPEL industry standard (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services). BPEL process definitions are translated into Petri nets and Petri net-based conformance checking techniques are applied to derive two complementary indicators of conformance: fitness and appropriateness. The approach has been implemented in a toolset for business process analysis and mining, namely ProM, and has been tested in an environment comprising multiple Oracle BPEL servers.

Abstract. In scenarios where a set of independent business partners engage in complex conversations, global interaction models are a means to specify the allowed interaction behavior from a global perspective. In these models atomic interactions serve as basic building blocks and behavioral dependencies are defined between them. Global interaction models might not be locally enforceable, i.e. they specify constraints that cannot be enforced during execution without additional synchronization interactions. As this property has only been defined textually so far, this paper presents a formal definition. For doing so, this paper introduces interaction Petri nets, a Petri net extension for representing global interaction models. Algorithms for deriving the behavioral interface for each partner and for enforceability checking are provided. 1

Abstract. We present a formal model for the coordination of interactions in service-oriented systems. This model provides a declarative semantics for the language SRML that is being developed under the FET-GC2 project SENSORIA for modelling and reasoning about complex services at the abstract business level. In SRML, interactions are conversational in the sense that they involve a number of correlated events that capture phenomena that are typical of SOC like committing to a pledge or revoking the effects of a deal. Events are exchanged across wires that connect the parties involved in the provision of the service. 1

Abstract. When a curriculum is proposed, it is important to verify at least three aspects: that the curriculum allows the achievement of the user’s learning goals, that the curriculum is compliant w.r.t. the course design goals, specified by the institution that offers it, and that the sequence of courses that defines the curriculum does not have competency gaps. In this work, we present a constrained-based representation for specifying the goals of “course design ” and introduce a design graphical language, grounded into Linear Time Logic.

Abstract. We present a service-oriented personalization system, set in an educational framework, based on a semantic annotation of courses including prerequisites and learning objectives. The system supports users in planning personalized curricula and in verifying the compliance of curricula against a model describing the designer goals. We have developed a prototype of the planning and validation services, by using SWI-Prolog and the SPIN model checker as reasoning engines. The services are supplied and combined in the Personal Reader framework. 1

(WFMSs) are not flexible enough to support loosely-structured processes. Furthermore, flexibility in contemporary WFMSs usually comes at a certain cost, such as lack of support for users, lack of methods for model analysis, lack of methods for analysis of past executions, etc. DECLARE is a prototype of a WFMS that uses a constraint-based process modeling language for the development of declarative models describing loosely-structured processes. In this paper we show how DECLARE can support loosely-structured processes without sacrificing important WFMSs features like user support, model verification, analysis of past executions, changing models at run-time, etc. I.

This chapter describes a design methodology for business processes and workflows that focuses first on “business artifacts”, which represent key (real or conceptual) business entities, including both the business-relevant data about them and their macro-level lifecycles. Individual workflow services (a.k.a. tasks) are then incorporated, by specifying how they operate on the artifacts and fit into their lifecycles. The resulting workflow is specified in a particular artifact-centric workflow model, which is introduced using an extended example. At the logical level this workflow model is largely declarative, in contrast with most traditional workflow models which are procedural and/or graph-based. The chapter includes a discussion of how the declarative, artifact-centric workflow specification can be mapped into an optimized physical realization. 1.

The recent upsurge in the interest in Semantic Web services and the high-profile projects such as the WSMO, OWL-S, and SWSL, have drawn attention to the importance of logic-based modeling of the behavior of Web services. In the context of Semantic Web services, the logic-based approach has many applications, including service discovery, service choreography, enactment, and contracting for services. In this paper we propose logic-based methods for reasoning about service behavior, including the aforementioned choreography, contracting, and enactment. The formalism underlying our framework is Concurrent Transaction Logic—a logic for declarative specification, analysis, and execution of database transactions. The new results include reasoning about service behavior under more general sets of constraints and extension of the framework towards conditional control and data flow—two crucial aspect that were missing in previous logical formalizations.

Abstract. The degree of flexibility of workflow management systems heavily influences the way business processes are executed. Constraint-based models are considered to be more flexible than traditional models because of their semantics: everything that does not violate constraints is allowed. Although constraint-based models are flexible, changes to process definitions might be needed to comply with evolving business domains and exceptional situations. Flexibility can be increased by run-time support for dynamic changes – transferring instances to a new model – and ad-hoc changes – changing the process definition for one instance. In this paper we propose a general framework for a constraint-based process modeling language and its implementation. Our approach supports both ad-hoc and dynamic change, and the transfer of instances can be done easier than in traditional approaches. 1