Validation, diagnosis and decision-making support of data in business processes

Abstract

Business processes involve data that can be modified and updated by various activities at any time. The data involved in a business process can be associated with flow elements or stored data. This data must satisfy the business compliance rules associated with the process, where business compliance rules are policies or statements that govern the behaviour of a company. To validate the correctness of a business process, it is necessary to validate the managed data before and during the process instantiation, since none of the activities of a process can work correctly using incorrect data. The analysis of the correctness of the business process is typically related to the activity executed according to the value of a data variable in each case, that verifies whether the model and the log conform to each other. The incorporation of the study of the correctness of the semantic of data value (called Business Data Constraints) is also consider essential. The execution of the correct activity according to the data is fundamental: it is no less important, however, to validate the correctness of the input data of a business process, and whether it affects the workflow and the compliance of the policies. In this paper, every special characteristic for the analysis of the correctness of data in a business process is studied, as is how the classic techniques can be improved for the validation, diagnosis and decision-making support concerning data in Business Processes.