Enhancing Formal Specification and Verification of Temporal Constraints in Business Processes

Formal specification and verification support of time-related constraints constitute fundamental challenges for any Business Process Management (BPM) system. Reluctantly, the literature on the subject of formal specification and verification of advanced temporal constraints such as absolute temporal constraints associated with relative temporal constraints is scarce. In this paper, we propose a novel approach enabling the formal specification and verification of advanced temporal constraints of business processes. The particularity of our approach is that it caters for relative and absolute related temporal constraints while relying on the dependencies that can exist between theses constraints. In fact, it is important to deal with such dependencies to handle the violations that can arise as soon as possible at design step. To do so, we propose a formal approach which relies on the timed automata formalism. In this context, we propose a set of mapping rules and algorithms where the semantic of timed automata is preserved even if we deal with absolute and relative temporal constraints. Using the defined formal model, we investigate a model checking based verification process that aims at validating business processes against their absolute and relative temporal constraints.