Quantifying Consistency between Conceptual and Executable Business Processes

Abstract

Business processes have been identified as effective means to developing service-based applications. It is an important and challenging research problem to check consistency between conceptual and executable business processes. Most existing approaches analyze the consistency based on qualitative equivalence relations between business processes and only provide a "true"/"false" result. Thus, they fail to differentiate slight inconsistency scenarios from totally inconsistency ones. To address this problem, we leverage activity constraints, i.e., partial orders, mutual-exclusions, and independences, to analyze consistency, and measure the consistency degree (ranging from 0 to 1.0) between a conceptual business process and an executable one based on the rate of consistent activity constraints. We show the applicability of our approach by analyzing the consistency between public views and private processes of some real-life BPEL processes.