Semantic Business Process Validation

The use of formal semantics for the support of Business Process Management is an emerging branch of research, with substantial economic potential. In particular, business processes modelled in graphical notations such as BPMN can be semantically annotated to specify more precisely what the individual tasks in the process will be responsible for. This raises the need for, and opens up the opportunity to apply, semantic validation techniques: techniques that take the annotations and the underlying ontology into account in order to determine whether the tasks are consistent with respect to each other, and with respect to the underlying workflow structure. To this end, we introduce a formalism for semantic business processes, which combines definitions from the workflow community with definitions from AI; we introduce some validation tasks that are of interest in this context. We then make first technical contributions towards solving this kind of problem. We identify a class of processes where the validation tasks can be solved in polynomial time, by propagating certain pieces of information through the process graphs. We show that this class of processes is maximal in the sense that, with more general semantic annotations, the validation tasks become computationally hard. We outline how the validation information gathered can serve to automatically suggest bug fixes.