Formalizing business process specifications

Abstract

The behavior of commercial systems is described with business process models. There are different notations and formalism to express business processes. Many of these notations such as BPMN or ARIS EPC models are widely used in commercial projects. In the paper we focus on formalisms to express rules and specifications for the business processes. Temporal logic in general is a suitable formalism to express rules for dynamic processes. CTL is one kind of temporal logic focusing on branches and paths in particular. With CTL it is possible to formulate rules about different paths in business processes. Since the textual formulae of CTL are not very suitable in the development of commercial systems we introduce a graphical notation (G-CTL) based on the business process notation ARIS EPC. Moreover, we add to the CTL semantics specializers to differentiate between the element types in business process models and provide wildcards which allow the user to check for unknown elements or elements with only partially known properties.