Verifiable UML Artifact-Centric Business Process Models (Extended Version)
This work addresses the need for verifiable business process models in domains like software engineering and business analysis, though it is incremental as it builds on existing lines of research.
The paper tackles the problem of verifying UML-based artifact-centric business process models by merging theoretical decidability results with a concrete modeling methodology, enabling verification against rich first-order temporal properties in significant cases.
Artifact-centric business process models have gained increasing momentum recently due to their ability to combine structural (i.e., data related) with dynamical (i.e., process related) aspects. In particular, two main lines of research have been pursued so far: one tailored to business artefact modeling languages and methodologies, the other focused on the foundations for their formal verification. In this paper, we merge these two lines of research, by showing how recent theoretical decidability results for verification can be fruitfully transferred to a concrete UML-based modeling methodology. In particular, we identify additional steps in the methodology that, in significant cases, guarantee the possibility of verifying the resulting models against rich first-order temporal properties. Notably, our results can be seamlessly transferred to different languages for the specification of the artifact lifecycles.