Validation of user intentions in process models

Abstract

Goal models and business process models are complementary artifacts for capturing the requirements and their execution flow in software engineering. Usually, goal models serve as input for designing business process models, and it requires mappings between both types of models. Due to the large number of possible configurations of elements from both goal models and business process models, developers struggle with the challenge of maintaining consistent configurations of both models and their mappings. Managing these mappings manually is error-prone. In our work, we propose an automated solution that relies on Description Logics and automated reasoners for validating mappings that describe the realization of goals by activities in business process models. The results are the identification of two inconsistency patterns- strong inconsistency and potential inconsistency, and the development of the corresponding algorithms for detecting inconsistencies. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.