Abstract not found

Abstract. Business process models can be compared, for example, to determine their consistency. Any comparison between process models relies on a mapping that identifies which activity in one model corresponds to which activity in another. Tools that generate such mappings are called matchers. This paper presents the ICoP framework, which can be used to develop such matchers. It consists of an architecture and re-usable matcher components. The framework enables the creation of matchers from the reusable components and, if desired, newly developed components. It focuses on matchers that also detect complex correspondences between groups of activities, where existing matchers focus on 1:1 correspondences. We evaluate the framework by applying it to find matches in process models from practice. We show that the framework can be used to develop matchers in a flexible and adaptable manner and that the resulting matchers can identify a significant number of complex correspondences. 1

Service orientation is a means for integrating across diverse systems. Each resource, whether an application, system, or trading partner, can be accessed as a service. The resulting architecture, often referred to as SOA, has been an important enabler for interorganizational processes. Apart from technological issues that need to be addressed, it is important that all parties involved in such processes agree on the “rules of engagement”. Therefore, we propose to use a contract that specifies the composition of the public views of all participating parties. Each party may then implement its part of the contract such that the implementation (i.e., the private view) accords with the contract. In this paper, we define a suitable notion of accordance inspired by the asynchronous nature of services. Moreover, we present several transformation rules for incrementally building a private view such that accordance with the contract is guaranteed by construction. These rules include adding internal tasks as well as the reordering of messages and are therefore much more powerful than existing correctness-preserving transformation rules.

Identification of behavioural contradictions is an important aspect of software engineering, in particular for checking the consistency between a business process model used as system specification and a corresponding workflow model used as implementation. In this paper, we propose causal behavioural profiles as the basis for a consistency notion, which capture essential behavioural information, such as order, exclusiveness, and causality between pairs of activities. Existing notions of behavioural equivalence, such as bisimulation and trace equivalence, might also be applied as consistency notions. Still, they are exponential in computation. Our novel concept of causal behavioural profiles provides a weaker behavioural consistency notion that can be computed efficiently using structural decomposition techniques for sound free-choice workflow systems if unstructured net fragments are acyclic or can be traced back to S- or T-nets.

Many reactive control systems consist of classes of interacting objects where the objects belonging to a class exhibit similar behaviors. Such interacting process classes appear in telecommunication, transportation and avionics domains. In this paper, we propose a modeling and simulation technique for interacting process classes. Our modeling style uses standard notations to capture behavior. In particular, the control flow of a process class is captured by a labeled transition system, unit interactions between process objects are described by Message Sequence Charts and the structural relations are captured via class diagrams. The key feature of our approach is that our execution semantics leads to a symbolic simulation technique. Our simulation strategy is both time and memory efficient and we demonstrate this on well-studied non-trivial examples of reactive systems.

Abstract. Service orientation is a means for integrating across diverse systems. Each resource, whether an application, system, or trading partner, can be accessed as a service. The resulting architecture, often referred to as SOA, has been an important enabler for interorganizational processes. Apart from technological issues that need to be addressed, it is important that all parties involved in such processes agree on the “rules of engagement”. Therefore, we propose to use a contract that specifies the composition of the public views of all participating parties. Each party may then implement its part of the contract such that the implementation (i.e., the private view) accords with the contract. In this paper, we define a suitable notion of accordance inspired by the asynchronous nature of services. Moreover, we present several transformation rules for incrementally building a private view such that accordance with the contract is guaranteed by construction. These rules include adding internal tasks as well as the reordering of messages and are therefore much more powerful than existing correctness-preserving transformation rules. 1

Abstract. A contract specifies an interorganizational process together with a distribution of responsibilities for the activities among the parties involved. In this paper, we formally show how a party can implement its part of the contract such that the implementation accords with the contract. We propose a formal notion of a contract and give a criterion for accordance between a local implementation and a contract such that, if all local implementations accord with the contract, the overall process is deadlock-free and it is always possible to terminate properly. Then, we sketch a technique for automatically checking the proposed accordance criterion. Finally, we present accordance-preserving transformation rules. These rules can be used to implement a part of the contract while preserving the accordance criterion. 1

Abstract. As systems become more service oriented and processes increasingly cross organizational boundaries, interaction becomes more important. New technologies support the development of such systems. However, the paradigm shift towards service orientation, requires a fundamentally different way of looking at processes. This survey aims to provide some foundational notions related to service interaction. A set of service interaction patterns is given to illustrate the challenges in this domain. Moreover, key results are given for three of these challenges: (1) How to expose a service?, (2) How to replace and refine services?, and (3) How to generate service adapters? These challenges will be addressed in a Petri net setting. However, the results extend to other languages used in this domain.

A contract specifies an interorganizational process together with a distribution of responsibilities for the activities among the parties involved. In this paper, we formally show how a party can implement its part of the contract such that the implementation accords with the contract. We propose a formal notion of a contract and give a criterion for accordance between a local implementation and a contract such that, if all local implementations accord with the contract, the overall process is deadlock-free and it is always possible to terminate properly. Then, we sketch a technique for automatically checking the proposed accordance criterion. Finally, we present accordance-preserving transformation rules. These rules can be used to implement a part of the contract while preserving the accordance criterion.

OOPr/T-Models are a class of object-oriented Petri-Nets which were introduced for the formally based modeling of (concurrent) object-oriented systems. The development of such systems is supported on arbitrary abstraction levels with static, dynamic, and functional views. These views describe the structure of a system, the behaviour of objects, and the functionality of methods. This article is focused on the behaviour of objects and introduces an extended formalization of dynamic views for the modeling of object life-cycles. Furthermore, a new approach for the Petri-Net based inheritance of object life-cycles is presented.