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Using the Guard-Stage-Milestone Notation for Monitoring BPMN-based Processes

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Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling (BPMDS 2016, EMMSAD 2016)

Abstract

Business processes are usually designed by means of imperative languages to model the acceptable execution of the activities performed within a system or an organization. At the same time, declarative languages are better suited to check the conformance of the states and transitions of the modeled process with respect to its actual execution. To avoid defining models twice from scratch to cope with both the process enactment and its monitoring, this paper proposes an approach for translating BPMN process models to E-GSM ones: an extension of the Guard-Stage-Milestone artifact-centric notation. The paper also shows how a monitoring engine based on E-GSM specifications can detect anomalies during the execution of the process and classify them according to different levels of severity, that is, with respect to the impact on the outcome of the process.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An ECA rule is an [on e ] [if c ] expression, that is triggered when an event e occurs and the condition c is true. When [on e ] is missing, the ECA is triggered once c becomes true, when [if c ] is missing, the ECA is triggered once e occurs.

  2. 2.

    In this paper we use the notation introduced in [5], so we write \({\texttt {S.DFG}}_\texttt {i}\), \({\texttt {S.PFG}}_\texttt {k}\), \({\texttt {S.FL}}_\texttt {l}\) to indicate the activation of a Data Flow Guard, Process Flow Guard, or a Fault Logger associated with Stage S, \({\texttt {+S.M}}_\texttt {j}\) (\({\texttt {-S.M}}_\texttt {j}\)) to indicate the achievement (invalidation) of a Milestone \({\texttt {M}}_\texttt {j}\), \({\texttt {S.M}}_\texttt {j}\) to indicate that Stage S is closed and a Milestone \({\texttt {M}}_\texttt {j}\) is achieved, and Active(S) to indicate that Stage S is opened.

  3. 3.

    The tool is publicly available at https://bitbucket.org/polimiisgroup/bpmn2egsm.

  4. 4.

    A prototype E-GSM engine is currently under development.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially funded by the Italian Project ITS Italy 2020 under the Technological National Clusters program.

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Correspondence to Giovanni Meroni .

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Baresi, L., Meroni, G., Plebani, P. (2016). Using the Guard-Stage-Milestone Notation for Monitoring BPMN-based Processes. In: Schmidt, R., Guédria, W., Bider, I., Guerreiro, S. (eds) Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling. BPMDS EMMSAD 2016 2016. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 248. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39429-9_2

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