Validation of Collaborative Business Processes using Goals Model

📝 Abstract

Validating process model against corresponding requirements is one of the most important problems in domain of collaborative processes. In this paper collaborative processes are modeled using the interaction view of BPMN 2.0 standard. Then, requirements are extracted with a goal modeling technique. Different scenarios of each requirement show possible paths for the system. These paths are modeled by sequence diagram and collaborative processes are validated according to the corresponding requirements using Savara tool.

💡 Analysis

Validating process model against corresponding requirements is one of the most important problems in domain of collaborative processes. In this paper collaborative processes are modeled using the interaction view of BPMN 2.0 standard. Then, requirements are extracted with a goal modeling technique. Different scenarios of each requirement show possible paths for the system. These paths are modeled by sequence diagram and collaborative processes are validated according to the corresponding requirements using Savara tool.

📄 Content

Validation of Collaborative Business Processes using Goals Model

Amir Ebrahimifard PhD Student, Department of Technology, Policy and Management, TU Delft University,

Mostafa Khoramabadi Arani MS Student, Department of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology,

Mohammad Javad Amiri PhD Student, Department of Computer Science, University of California Santa Barbara, USA,

Saeed Parsa Professor, Department of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology,

Abstract—Validating process model against corresponding requirements is one of the most important problems in domain of collaborative processes. In this paper collaborative processes are modeled using the interaction view of BPMN 2.0 standard. Then, requirements are extracted with a goal modeling technique. Different scenarios of each requirement show possible paths for the system. These paths are modeled by sequence diagram and collaborative processes are validated according to the corresponding requirements using Savara tool.

Keywords— Collaborative process, Business process, Validation, Requirement, Goals Model.

1. Introduction

A collaborative process shows a collaboration between different processes to provide a composite service. Service composition is the process of developing a composite service from atomic services [1]. The aim of web service composition is to arrange multiple services into collaborative workflow supplying complex user needs [2]. Today, with service composition, instead of developing monolithic applications, we build large-scale software applications by composing loosely coupled services [3]. By doing so, we can reuse and select suitable services as various organizations can provide similar services for the development of different applications [4]. There are two possible ways for service composition: orchestration and choreography that are defined as two aspects of inter- and intra-organization service composition.
Choreography describes a system in a top view manner in which multiple cooperating independent agents exchange messages in order to perform a task to achieve a goal state whereas orchestration focuses on single peer’s description [5]. Choreography basically uses to represent a collaborative business process. Choreographies are particularly useful in those situations in which multiple parties have to collaborate, but none of them wants to take the responsibility of running a centralized orchestration [6]. One of the most important issues in choreography service composition is choreography validation. It is defined as accordance between requirements and choreography definition. In other words, to what extent a choreography definition can explain and justify requirements specifies validity level of that choreography definition [7]. Currently in the context of choreography validation, lack of a comprehensive validation method to validate model against the requirements is counted as a major issue. To overcome the abovementioned issue, requirements are considered as the base of choreography model validation in the proposed method. To this end, goals modeling technique is used to extract the requirements of the target process. Then, for each requirement all possible scenarios are described. These

scenarios are modeled using Savara tool. In the next step the choreography process is modeled using BPMN 2.0 interaction modeling. By modeling the process, the next step is extracting all possible paths from the model and matching each path with the corresponding requirement. If all requirements are satisfied, that is all possible scenarios occurred and there are no extra paths in the model, the model is valid.
This paper is organized as follows. Requirement extraction using goal modelling technique is presented in Section 2. The focus of Section 3 is on process choreography modeling. Section 4 provides information to validate a choreography model. In Section 5 an evaluation of our method is presented and conclusions are included in Section 6.

2. Requirement Extraction In this section a goal modelling technique is introduced to extract requirements. To start with, we introduce a Purchasing process which is used as a running example in this paper.

Running Example: In a purchase process three parties are participated; buyer, agency, and factory. A buyer corporation sends a registration request. If the type of request is ordinary, the request does not need to be confirmed, but if there is a special request, the registration should be confirmed by the agency. Also, if the type of request is superior, the agency sends the request to the factory and the factory gets the information from the agency and confirms the request. In all three cases, the buyer should start the registration sub-process. After the registration, the buyer can order the request to factory. The factory should confirm this request and until the

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