Lecture: 'Modeling and Verifying Time-aware Business Processes'

My research work focuses on modeling and verifying temporal constraints, which are dealt with in the context of Process-Aware Information systems (PAIS). All experts agree that time is a key factor for PAIS. Satisfying temporal constraints such as deadlines or the duration of an activity is vital for organizations. For example, trade organizations aim at offering competitive products within respected deadlines. Transport industries, healthcare organizations, and banking systems, also depend on temporal constraints, since the violation of these constraints may lead to critical situations and could even threaten the safety of stakeholders. We identified the following challenges related to temporal properties for PAIS. First, most of the existing business modeling languages do not support temporal constraints. For example, the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), the standards of OMG for representing BPs, poorly handles the time dimension. Second, a high-level specification of business processes enriched with temporal constraints can contain conflicts between such constraints, which lead to deadlocks and inconsistent process-aware information systems. Third, defining temporal constraints in business processes may have a negative impact on the collaboration of business processes, which can lead to errors and incompatibilities. The involved business processes need to verify the matching of their temporal constraints to ensure the consistency of the collaboration.

To tackle these challenges, we propose an approach for modeling and verifying non-functional safety properties. I focus on the temporal properties of process-aware information systems by considering four different systems: inter-organizational systems, Cloud-based systems, cyber-physical systems, and Blockchain-based systems. In this talk, I will present the challenges and an overview of my contributions for each system