Flavio Corradini

Flavio Corradini, Andrea Morichetta, Andrea Polini et al.

The BPMN 2.0 standard is a widely used semi-formal notation to model distributed information systems from different perspectives. The standard makes available a set of diagrams to represent such perspectives. Choreography diagrams represent global constraints concerning the interactions among system components without exposing their internal structure. Collaboration diagrams instead permit to depict the internal behaviour of a component, also referred as process, when integrated with others so to represent a possible implementation of the distributed system. This paper proposes a design methodology and a formal framework for checking conformance of choreographies against collaborations. In particular, the paper presents a direct formal operational semantics for both BPMN choreography and collaboration diagrams. Conformance aspects are proposed through two relations defined on top of the defined semantics. The approach benefits from the availability of a tool we have developed, named C4, that permits to experiment the theoretical framework in practical contexts. The objective here is to make the exploited formal methods transparent to system designers, thus fostering a wider adoption by practitioners.

Flavio Corradini, Alberto Polzonetti, Oliviero Riganelli

The introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into public administrations has been radically changing the way organizations cooperate and, more generally, the way to think about business processes over organizational boundaries. In this paper we describe our approach to combining business processes with business rules in order to integrate effectively single units in an inter- or intra-organizational cooperation. Business rules represent the knowledge that an administration has about its business; with regard to this, they can express strategies, contracts and can influence not only staff relations, but, finally, citizen relations, as well. In other words, business rules are the core of an administration and affect either the business processes or the behaviours of the system participants. They are typically expressed implicitly in business contracts and they are embedded within the source code of many application modules. So a concise and declarative statement of business behaviour is converted into a set of programming instructions, which are spread widely throughout the whole information system. In this way, business rules are difficult to change and keep consistent over the time. For this reason, it is necessary to reengineer the system in order to logically and perhaps physically externalize rules from the application code. In our proposed approach, we describe a cooperation as a collection of tasks combined in certain ways according to the organization logic specified by business rules. Our rule-driven methodology has the goal to make the business process design more adaptable to the changes of internal or external environment.