Abstract
A business process is a combination of structured and related activities that aim at fulfilling a specific organizational goal for a customer or market. An important measure when developing a business process is the degree of parallelism, namely, the maximum number of tasks that are executable in parallel at any given time in a process. This measure determines the peak demand on tasks and thus can provide valuable insight on the problem of resource allocation in business processes. This paper considers timed business processes modeled in BPMN, a workflow-based graphical notation for processes, where execution times can be associated to several BPMN constructs such as tasks and flows. An encoding of timed business processes into Maude’s rewriting logic system is presented, enabling the automatic computation of timed degrees of parallelism for business processes. The approach is illustrated with a simple yet realistic case study in which the degree of parallelism is used to improve the business process design with the ultimate goal of optimizing resources and, therefore, with the potential for reducing operating costs.
Keywords
- Business Process Model And Notation (BPMN)
- BPMN Processes
- Rewriting Logic
- BPMN Constructs
- Inclusive Gateway
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bouhoula, A., Jouannaud, J.-P., Meseguer, J.: Specification and proof in membership equational logic. Theor. Comput. Sci. 236(1), 35–132 (2000)
Clavel, M., Durán, F., Eker, S., Lincoln, P., Martí-Oliet, N., Meseguer, J., Talcott, C.: All About Maude - A High-Performance Logical Framework, How to Specify, Program and Verify Systems in Rewriting Logic. LNCS, vol. 4350. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71999-1
Corradini, F., Fornari, F., Polini, A., Re, B., Tiezzi, F., Vandin, A.: BProVe: a formal verification framework for business process models. In: Proceedings of ASE, pp. 217–228. IEEE Computer Society (2017)
Dijkman, R., Dumas, M., Ouyang, C.: Semantics and analysis of business process models in BPMN. Inf. Softw. Technol. 50(12), 1281–1294 (2008)
Durán, F., Rocha, C., Salaün, G.: Stochastic analysis of BPMN with time in rewriting logic. Sci. Comput. Program. 168, 1–17 (2018)
Durán, F., Salaün, G.: Verifying timed BPMN processes using Maude. In: Jacquet, J.-M., Massink, M. (eds.) COORDINATION 2017. LNCS, vol. 10319, pp. 219–236. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59746-1_12
El-Saber, N., Boronat, A.: BPMN formalization and verification using Maude. In: Proceedings of BM-FA 2014, pp. 1–8. ACM (2014)
Esparza, J.: Reachability in live and safe free-choice Petri nets is NP-complete. Theor. Comput. Sci. 198, 211–224 (1998)
ISO/IEC. International Standard 19510, Information technology - Business Process Model and Notation (2013)
Kheldoun, A., Barkaoui, K., Ioualalen, M.: Specification and verification of complex business processes - a high-level Petri net-based approach. In: Motahari-Nezhad, H.R., Recker, J., Weidlich, M. (eds.) BPM 2015. LNCS, vol. 9253, pp. 55–71. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23063-4_4
Krishna, A., Poizat, P., Salaün, G.: VBPMN: automated verification of BPMN processes (tool paper). In: Polikarpova, N., Schneider, S. (eds.) IFM 2017. LNCS, vol. 10510, pp. 323–331. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66845-1_21
Mateescu, R., Salaün, G., Ye, L.: Quantifying the parallelism in BPMN processes using model checking. In: Proceedings of CBSE 2014, pp. 159–168. ACM (2014)
Mayr, E.: An algorithm for the general Petri net reachability problem. SIAM J. Comput. 13(3), 441–460 (1984)
Meseguer, J.: Conditional rewriting logic as a unified model of concurrency. Theor. Comput. Sci. 96(1), 73–155 (1992)
Morales, L.E.M., Capel, M.I., Pérez, M.A.: Conceptual framework for business processes compositional verification. Inf. Soft. Technol. 54(2), 149–161 (2012)
Ölveczky, P.C., Meseguer, J.: Semantics and pragmatics of real-time Maude. High.-Order Symbolic Comput. 20(1–2), 161–196 (2007)
OMG. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) - Version 2.0, January 2011
Poizat, P., Salaün, G.: Checking the realizability of BPMN 2.0 choreographies. In: Proceedings of SAC 2012, pp. 1927–1934. ACM Press (2012)
Sun, Y., Su, J.: Computing degree of parallelism for BPMN processes. In: Kappel, G., Maamar, Z., Motahari-Nezhad, H.R. (eds.) ICSOC 2011. LNCS, vol. 7084, pp. 1–15. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25535-9_1
Wong, P.Y.H., Gibbons, J.: A process semantics for BPMN. In: Liu, S., Maibaum, T., Araki, K. (eds.) ICFEM 2008. LNCS, vol. 5256, pp. 355–374. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88194-0_22
Wynn, M.T., Verbeek, H.M.W., van der Aalst, W.M.P., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Edmond, D.: Business process verification - finally a reality!. Bus. Process Manag. J. 15(1), 74–92 (2009)
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. F. Durán has been partially supported by Spanish MINECO/FEDER project TIN2014-52034-R. The work of C. Rocha was partially supported by CAPES, Colciencias, and Inria via the STIC AmSud project “EPIC: EPistemic Interactive Concurrency” (Proc. No 88881.117603/2016-01), and by Capital Semilla 2017, project “SCORES: Stochastic Concurrency in Rewrite-based Probabilistic Models” (Proj. No. 020100610).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Durán, F., Rocha, C., Salaün, G. (2018). Computing the Parallelism Degree of Timed BPMN Processes. In: Mazzara, M., Ober, I., Salaün, G. (eds) Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations. STAF 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11176. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04771-9_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04771-9_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04770-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04771-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)