Verification of Time-Aware Business Processes using Constrained Horn Clauses
This work addresses verification challenges for business processes with time constraints, offering a domain-specific solution that is incremental in applying existing CHC techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of verifying properties of time-aware business processes by using constrained Horn clauses, resulting in a method that can check temporal properties through specialization and solver-based satisfiability checks.
We present a method for verifying properties of time-aware business processes, that is, business process where time constraints on the activities are explicitly taken into account. Business processes are specified using an extension of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and durations are defined by constraints over integer numbers. The definition of the operational semantics is given by a set OpSem of constrained Horn clauses (CHCs). Our verification method consists of two steps. (Step 1) We specialize OpSem with respect to a given business process and a given temporal property to be verified, whereby getting a set of CHCs whose satisfiability is equivalent to the validity of the given property. (Step 2) We use state-of-the-art solvers for CHCs to check the satisfiability of such sets of clauses. We have implemented our verification method using the VeriMAP transformation system, and the Eldarica and Z3 solvers for CHCs.