Verification of Invariant Properties of Business Process Based on Formal Approach

The concept of business process management (BPM) is in the spotlight and it is getting popular to design, enact and monitor a business process from the viewpoint of BPM. It often happens, however, that designed business process models often do not satisfy correctness properties such as executability, satisfiability and so on. Therefore it is necessary to check those correctness properties of a business process at its design phase. Although most of BPM systems have a functionality of simulation, it is not based on rigorous mathematical background. In this paper, we propose an approach to use formal specification in order to verify invariant properties of a business process rigorously at the design phase. Toward this goal, firstly, we define the transformation from a business process model in XML process definition language (XPDL), which is one of the standard description of a process in BPM, to the model in VDM specification language (VDM-SL), which is one of popular formal specification language for software. Then we verify the invariant properties of the transformed model with VDM development support tool called VDMTools.