Development of Collaborative Business Processes: A Correctness Enforcement Approach

Collaborative business processes gather a set of business processes with complementary competencies and knowledge to cooperate to achieve more business successes. To ensure their successful implementation, correctness is a key issue that needs to be addressed during their development. To this end, a novel correctness enforcement approach is proposed to support the development of collaborative business processes. In this approach, we first give an algorithm to check the correctness of an original process specified by Petri nets. Then, we prune its reachability graph to obtain its core in case of partially correct, which is a reduced reachability graph that doesn't cover invalid states. Finally, we generate a set of controllers from the core using coordination mapping (i.e., inserting some coordination activities into controllers), and then an enforced process is built by the composition of the original process and the controllers. Our approach is implemented as an analysis module called cetool in the PIPE (Platform Independent Petri Net Editor) and it is validated on a set of real-world cases. The results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.