Business Process Validation

Abstract

Business processes and workflows are crucial elements in the design and development of commercial systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or e-commerce systems and many more. Despite their important role there are little means to ensure the correctness of these processes and workflows as well as consistency between them. In contrast to other verification problems the semantics of business processes to be checked are less explicit and formalised. Nevertheless the processes and workflows have to be considered as highly complex and are consisting in most cases out of a very large number of sub- processes which are very hard to be overlooked manually. Means for ensuring the quality of business processes may be business rules and guidelines driven by experience and domain knowledge. Adequate models for static dependencies and dynamic behaviour and modelling tools help capturing the important semantics. Verification technology like model checking will support the quality assurance.