Abstract
Properties of business processes are investigated in Chapter 6. After investigating the role of data in business processes, the discussion is extended to data objects that contain behaviour. In particular, the relationships between object lifecycles and business processes are investigated, introducing the notion of object lifecycle conformance. In the second part of that chapter, soundness criteria are discussed, ranging from classical soundness to advanced concepts like relaxed soundness and lazy soundness. An overview of the relationships between the soundness criteria complete this chapter.
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Bibliographical Notes
Bibliographical Notes
Soundness of workflow nets has been introduced in van der Aalst (1998); further investigations on finding control flow errors in workflow specifications are reported in van der Aalst (2000). Structural correctness criteria of process models can be analyzed using the workflow analyzer Woflan, described in van der Aalst (1999) and Verbeek et al. (2001). Woflan is able to read process models specified in different process modelling languages; after internally translating the process models to a workflow net representation, the soundness properties of the process models can be analyzed.
Checking the various soundness properties is also possible with the BPM Academic Initiative software run by Signavio. It uses the soundness checking functionality provided by Lohmann and Wolf (2010) via a Web services interface. An introduction to the BPM Academic Initiative with an analysis of its process model repository can be found in Kunze et al. (2011).
Relaxed soundness was the first of the weaker soundness criteria proposed. It was published in Dehnert and Rittgen (2001). Based on this work, Siegeris and Zimmermann (2006) introduce the composition of processes, while allowing us to validate relaxed soundness. Weak soundness is introduced in Martens (2003b), where the composition of Web services is also addressed.
The general idea of lazy soundness is introduced in Puhlmann and Weske (2006b); a thorough analysis of lazy soundness and a formalization in the π-calculus is reported in Puhlmann (2007). Interaction soundness is introduced in Puhlmann and Weske (2006a); it is based on lazy soundness and takes into account the specific properties of service-oriented architectures, in which business partners can be bound dynamically, that is, at run time of the process instances. The π-calculus provides link passing mobility, a concept that represents well the dynamic structures that are found in dynamic service landscapes.
Object lifecycle conformance is introduced in Küster et al. (2007), where also techniques for generating business process models from object lifecycles are investigated.
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Weske, M. (2012). Properties of Business Processes. In: Business Process Management. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28616-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28616-2_6
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