Detecting data flow errors across processes in business process collaboration

Abstract

In business process collaboration (BPC), especially when it comes to message communication and data exchange, there are complex data dependencies among sender process, receiver process and messages. However, each participant of the overall BPC develops its part independently as a service, including its own communication part and data flow. As a result, data flow errors across processes may occur easily. In this article, we propose a method based on BPMN to detect these errors caused by data dependency violations. Our method is inspired by the study of detecting data flow errors within a single process and focuses on a subset of the elements of the BPC model, without having to consider the complete set. In particular, we define a set of data flow error patterns by analyzing and formalizing data dependencies in order to clearly clarify and identify errors. Then we give the corresponding automatic detection algorithm. Finally, through two evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.