Beyond goal representation: Checking goal-satisfaction by temporal reasoning with business processes

Abstract

Most formal approaches to goals proposed within information systems engineering, view goals from the requirements engineering perspective, i.e. for producing future software. Typically, these approaches begin with extracting goals from informal reality and end with representing them in some formal language, leaving the questions arising afterwards unanswered: How can we check whether goals are achieved or not in real business processes? If the goals are not satisfied, why and what to do? This paper presents a formal approach to representing and reasoning with goals using a first order many sorted temporal logic, where goals are expressed in terms of actions and static and temporal constraints; the above questions are answered by model theoretic formal reasoning with goals and business processes.