SMT-Based Safety Verification of Data-Aware Processes under Ontologies (Extended Version)
This work addresses safety verification for artifact-centric systems, but it is incremental as it adapts an existing model to a new ontology framework.
The paper tackles the problem of verifying safety properties in data-aware processes by extending simple artifact systems to operate over a description logic ontology, resulting in decidability in PSPACE for safety verification.
In the context of verification of data-aware processes (DAPs), a formal approach based on satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) has been considered to verify parameterised safety properties of so-called artifact-centric systems. This approach requires a combination of model-theoretic notions and algorithmic techniques based on backward reachability. We introduce here a variant of one of the most investigated models in this spectrum, namely simple artifact systems (SASs), where, instead of managing a database, we operate over a description logic (DL) ontology expressed in (a slight extension of) RDFS. This DL, enjoying suitable model-theoretic properties, allows us to define DL-based SASs to which backward reachability can still be applied, leading to decidability in PSPACE of the corresponding safety problems.