Livelock and deadlock detection for PA inter-organizational business processes

Abstract

The Public Administration domain is characterized by the dominance of inter-organizational Business Processes. These are a set of interrelated and sequential activities shared and executed by two or more Public Administration officies to achieve a business objective that is of value to citizens or companies in term of services. A Business Process results from the un-trivial integration of internal administration processes, so that structural problems such as livelock or deadlock may easily occur and in reality they are generally solved by involved civil servants. Nevertheless with the shift versus an electronic government this problem becomes particularly relevant. The paper presents a suitable approach for inter-organizational Business Process detection of livelock and deadlock situations. In particular, we introduce an approach to directly verify a Business Process modeled using the BPMN 2.0 semi-formal notation. The verification uses a state evaluation technique with an optimized unfolding algorithm considering specific BPMN 2.0 characteristics. A plug-in for the Eclipse platform has been also developed, which permits to have an integrated environment in which to design Business Process, using the Eclipse BPMN 2.0 Modeler, and to automatically verify it. The approach and the tool prototype have been successfully applied to real scenarios such as family reunion, grant citizenship and buoncer registration. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.