Recovering Latent Data Flow from Business Process Model Automatically

Abstract

Process-driven applications evolve rapidly through the interaction between executable BPMN (Business Process Modeling and Notation) models, business tasks, and external services. Given these components operate on some shared process data, it is imperative to recover the latent data by visiting relation, which is known as data flow among these tasks. Data flow will benefit some typical applications including data flow anomaly checking and data privacy protection. However, in most cases, the complete data flow in a business process is not explicitly defined but hidden in model elements such as form declarations, variable declarations, and program code. Some methods to recovering data flow based on process model analysis of source code have some drawbacks; i.e., for security reasons, users do not want to provide source code but only encapsulated methods; therefore, data flows are difficult to analyze. We propose a method to generate running logs that are used to produce a complete data flow picture combined with the static code analysis method. This method combines the simple and easy-to-use characteristics of static code analysis methods and makes up for the shortcomings of static code analysis methods that cannot adapt to complex business processes, and as a result, the analyzed data flow is inaccurate. Moreover, a holistic framework is proposed to generate the data flow graph. The prototype system designed on Camunda and Flowable BPM (business process management) engine proves the applicability of the solution. The effectiveness of our method is validated on the prototype system.