Soundness Verification of Business Processes Specified in the Pi-Calculus

Recent research in the area of business process management (BPM) introduced the application of a process algebra--the π-calculus-- for the formal description of business processes and interactions among them. Especially in the area of service-oriented architectures, the key architecture for today's BPM systems, the π-calculus--as well as other process algebras--have shown their benefits in representing dynamic topologies. What is missing, however, are investigations regarding the correctness, i.e. soundness, of process algebraic formalizations of business processes. Due to the fact that most existing soundness properties are given for Petri nets, these cannot be applied. This paper closes the gap by giving characterizations of invariants on the behavior of business processes in terms of bisimulation equivalence. Since bisimulation equivalence is a well known concept in the world of process algebras, the characterizations can directly be applied to π-calculus formalizations of business processes. In particular, we investigate the characterization of five major soundness properties, i.e. easy, lazy, weak, relaxed, and classical soundness.

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