Design-Time Compliance of Service Compositions in Dynamic Service Environments

In order to improve the flexibility of information systems, an increasing amount of business processes is being automated by implementing tasks as modular services in service compositions. As organizations are required to adhere to laws and regulations, with this increased flexibility there is a demand for automated compliance checking of business processes. Model checking is a technique which exhaustively and automatically verifies system models against specifications of interest, e.g. a finite state machine against a set of logic formulas. When model checking business processes, existing approaches either cause large amounts of overhead, linearize models to such an extent that activity parallelization is lost, offer only checking of runtime execution traces, or introduce new and unknown logics. In order to fully benefit from existing model checking techniques, we propose a mapping from workflow patterns to a class of labeled transition systems known as Kripke structures. With this mapping, we provide pre-runtime compliance checking using well-known branching time temporal logics. The approach is validated on a complex abstract process which includes a deferred choice, parallel branching, and a loop. The process is modeled using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard, converted into a colored Petri net using the workflow patterns, and subsequently translated into a Kripke structure, which is then used for verification.