A Formal Model for Business Process Configuration Verification Supporting OR-Join Semantics

Abstract

In today’s industries, similar process models are typically reused in different application contexts. These models result in a number of process model variants sharing several commonalities and exhibiting some variations. Configurable process models came to represent and group these variants in a generic manner. These processes are configured according to a specific context through configurable elements. Considering the large number of possible variants as well as the potentially complex configurable process, the configuration may be a tedious task and errors may lead to serious behavioral issues. Since achieving configuration in a correct manner has become of paramount importance, the analysts undoubtedly need assistance and guidance in configuring process variants. In this work, we propose a formal behavioral model based on the Symbolic Observation Graph (SOG) allowing to find the set of deadlock-free configuration choices while avoiding the well-known state-space explosion problem and considering loops and OR-join semantics. These choices are used to support business analysts in deriving deadlock-free variants.