TY  - JOUR
A1  - Weidlich, Matthias
A1  - Mendling, Jan
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Efficient consistency measurement based on behavioral profiles of process models
JF  - IEEE transactions on software engineering
N2  - Engineering of process-driven business applications can be supported by process modeling efforts in order to bridge the gap between business requirements and system specifications. However, diverging purposes of business process modeling initiatives have led to significant problems in aligning related models at different abstract levels and different perspectives. Checking the consistency of such corresponding models is a major challenge for process modeling theory and practice. In this paper, we take the inappropriateness of existing strict notions of behavioral equivalence as a starting point. Our contribution is a concept called behavioral profile that captures the essential behavioral constraints of a process model. We show that these profiles can be computed efficiently, i.e., in cubic time for sound free-choice Petri nets w.r.t. their number of places and transitions. We use behavioral profiles for the definition of a formal notion of consistency which is less sensitive to model projections than common criteria of behavioral equivalence and allows for quantifying deviation in a metric way. The derivation of behavioral profiles and the calculation of a degree of consistency have been implemented to demonstrate the applicability of our approach. We also report the findings from checking consistency between partially overlapping models of the SAP reference model.
KW  - Process model analysis
KW  - process model alignment
KW  - behavioral abstraction
KW  - consistency checking
KW  - consistency measures
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2010.96
SN  - 0098-5589
VL  - 37
IS  - 3
SP  - 410
EP  - 429
PB  - Inst. of Electr. and Electronics Engineers
CY  - Los Alamitos
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Polyvyanyy, Artem
A1  - Weidlich, Matthias
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Connectivity of workflow nets the foundations of stepwise verification
JF  - Acta informatica
N2  - Behavioral models capture operational principles of real-world or designed systems. Formally, each behavioral model defines the state space of a system, i.e., its states and the principles of state transitions. Such a model is the basis for analysis of the system's properties. In practice, state spaces of systems are immense, which results in huge computational complexity for their analysis. Behavioral models are typically described as executable graphs, whose execution semantics encodes a state space. The structure theory of behavioral models studies the relations between the structure of a model and the properties of its state space. In this article, we use the connectivity property of graphs to achieve an efficient and extensive discovery of the compositional structure of behavioral models; behavioral models get stepwise decomposed into components with clear structural characteristics and inter-component relations. At each decomposition step, the discovered compositional structure of a model is used for reasoning on properties of the whole state space of the system. The approach is exemplified by means of a concrete behavioral model and verification criterion. That is, we analyze workflow nets, a well-established tool for modeling behavior of distributed systems, with respect to the soundness property, a basic correctness property of workflow nets. Stepwise verification allows the detection of violations of the soundness property by inspecting small portions of a model, thereby considerably reducing the amount of work to be done to perform soundness checks. Besides formal results, we also report on findings from applying our approach to an industry model collection.
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-011-0137-8
SN  - 0001-5903
VL  - 48
IS  - 4
SP  - 213
EP  - 242
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
ER  -