An LTL Semantics of Business Workflows with Recovery
This work addresses the challenge of deploying formal engineering techniques in practical business workflows, which is often hindered by complexity and invasiveness, by offering a lightweight approach.
The paper tackles the problem of designing correct business workflows with recovery mechanisms by providing a formal semantics using Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) and model checking, resulting in a methodology that enables iterative revision and correct-by-construction systems without requiring radical changes to existing processes.
We describe a business workflow case study with abnormal behavior management (i.e. recovery) and demonstrate how temporal logics and model checking can provide a methodology to iteratively revise the design and obtain a correct-by construction system. To do so we define a formal semantics by giving a compilation of generic workflow patterns into LTL and we use the bound model checker Zot to prove specific properties and requirements validity. The working assumption is that such a lightweight approach would easily fit into processes that are already in place without the need for a radical change of procedures, tools and people's attitudes. The complexity of formalisms and invasiveness of methods have been demonstrated to be one of the major drawback and obstacle for deployment of formal engineering techniques into mundane projects.