Towards Formalization and Verification of Unified Business Process Model Based on Pi Calculus

Nowadays, workflow modeling and analysis has become the focus of study with growing demands on business process management (BPM). In this paper, after defining basic elements (task, user, resource and constraint) of business process, then we propose a formal modeling method of unified business process based on the process algebra language-Pi calculus, integrating tasks, users and resources. Besides modeling control flow, interactional behavior of tasks, users and resources, such as task execution and resource access, can be emphasized so that the unified formal model can satisfy actual running requirements. Also, analysis and verification method of model correctness based on process deduction rule of pi calculus is provided. Next, we establish the Pi calculus model to a concrete business process instance using the modeling approach we propose above. The work reported in this paper provides a theoretical foundation and formal method for modeling and analysis of unified business process.

[1]  C. R. Ramakrishnan,et al.  Logic based modeling and analysis of workflows , 1998, PODS '98.

[2]  Peter Fingar,et al.  Workflow is just a pi process , 2003 .

[3]  Henry H. Bi,et al.  Applying Propositional Logic to Workflow Verification , 2004, Inf. Technol. Manag..

[4]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management , 1998, J. Circuits Syst. Comput..

[5]  Vijayalakshmi Atluri,et al.  A Petri net based safety analysis of workflow authorization models^1 , 2000 .

[6]  Kees M. van Hee,et al.  Workflow Management: Models, Methods, and Systems , 2002, Cooperative information systems.

[7]  Robin Milner,et al.  Communicating and mobile systems - the Pi-calculus , 1999 .

[8]  Hao Lin,et al.  A novel graph reduction algorithm to identify structural conflicts , 2002, Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[9]  Vijayalakshmi Atluri,et al.  Modeling and Analysis of Workflows Using Petri Nets , 1998, Journal of Intelligent Information Systems.

[10]  Julian Padget,et al.  A pi-calculus Model of a Spanish Fish Market - Preliminary Report , 1998, AMET.

[11]  Mathias Weske,et al.  Using the pi-Calculus for Formalizing Workflow Patterns , 2005, Business Process Management.

[12]  Vijayalakshmi Atluri,et al.  A Petri Net Based Safety Analysis of Workflow Authorization Models , 2000, J. Comput. Secur..

[13]  Howard Smith,et al.  Business Process Management: The Third Wave , 2003 .

[14]  Fei Xu,et al.  A Workflow Verification Method Based on Calculus. , 2007, First Joint IEEE/IFIP Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering (TASE '07).

[15]  Munindar P. Singh,et al.  Interaction protocols as design abstractions for business processes , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[16]  Maria E. Orlowska,et al.  Analyzing Process Models Using Graph Reduction Techniques , 2000, Inf. Syst..