Social specifications of business processes with Azzurra

A business process is first and foremost a social interaction among multiple participants. Business process modeling languages support the description of business processes in operational terms, as collections of interleaved activities conducted by human and software agents. However, such descriptions do not capture adequately the richness of social interaction among participants. To address this deficiency, we propose Azzurra, a specification language for modeling and enacting business processes. Azzurra is founded on social concepts, such as roles, agents and commitments among them, and Azzurra specifications are social models consisting of sets of commitments. As such, Azzurra specifications support flexible executions of business processes, and provide a semantic notion of actor accountability and business process compliance. In this paper, we present syntax and semantics of Azzurra, and we propose algorithms to determine runtime compliance with an Azzurra specification.