A Comparison of Soundness Results Obtained by Different Approaches

Business processes are often modelled using a language for which no semantics is standardized in a formal way. Examples for such languages are BPMN or Event-Driven Process Chains (EPC). The common way for reasoning about the soundness of such models is to define a formal semantics first by translating the model into a well-founded formalism (for example Petri-nets). Afterwards, formal reasoning methods can be applied on the obtained formal model. In the past years, several such semantics that give a formal meaning to BPMN or EPC models have been published. In this paper, we used a repository of almost 1,000 real-world EPC models and computed their soundness using three different tools. Those tools build on different semantics definitions: Kindler’s fixed-point semantics, Mendling’s state/context semantics and the YAWL semantics. While the soundness results for the majority of models were the same for all three tools, we identified a few interesting cases where the results differ. The results of our comparative study can lead to a better understanding of the differences between the semantics.