Advanced Reduction Rules for the Verification of EPC Business Process Models

Abstract

Conceptual business process models such as Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs) play an important role in the business process management life cycle. The pro- blem in this context is that most of today’s commercial business process management tools provide only limited support for quality assurance beyond simple syntax checks. In this paper we focus on verification of behavioral correctness as one of the major qua- lity issues for process models. To be more concise, we introduce advanced reduction rules for EPCs in order to address the requirements of performance and identificati- on of errors in practice. We present the verification tool xoEPC that implements the reduction rules. It provides detailed feedback to the modeler where errors are located in the model, and generates a report on quality issues in a process model collection. We present the application of xoEPC to the analysis of the SAP reference model to illustrate the tool.