Towards a Full Model-Driven Approach for Modeling and Verifying Business Process Models Using CPN

Abstract

This work addresses one of the core issues in modern enterprises applications: Business Process (BP), by proposing a new comprehensive model-driven approach for automated and formal verification of BP models. This allows BP specialists to formally and automatically verify their process models, without needing a deep knowledge of formal methods. The approach automatically converts BP models to Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) using CPN Tools for the analysis purposes. It starts with meta-modeling formalisms of BP and CPNs using Atom3 Tool. At this level, it proposes two graph grammars. The former converts BP models into their corresponding CPNs and the latter interprets the acquired CPN models in a text format based on XML. This enables model transfer from Atom3 to CPN tools by assessing the correctness of the BP model. In order to test the functional utility of our proposed approach, we applied it to several examples and the results showed that the system is working correctly and that inconsistencies are detected in BP models. One detailed example is given to illustrate our approach.