Modeling Workflow for Judicial Business Processes: A Use Case Driven Method

Information systems are now widely used to automate the manage and execution of judicial business processes. However, the design of a judicial information system is in nature complex, and it is difficult to ensure its correctness and trustworthiness, including the security and integrity of the data about the evidence and the conformance to laws, regulation and rules of practice, in the design and the execution of judicial workflows. In this paper, we focus on how to improve the correctness and trustworthiness of the information system through the development of models of workflows at different levels of abstraction and in different degrees of formality. The final model before the implementation is a formal model which can be formally validated and its implementation is provable correctly. Our proposed method starts with informal use case modeling and gradually transforms to formal Communicating Sequential Process (CSP) modeling. To transform use case models into a model in CSP, the specified use cases are refined into use case sequence diagrams and the relationships between use cases are represented as the case model. Our method combine the advantages of informal models and formal models. It support the modeler to communicate with domain users and experts. With the formal model in CSP, designers are capable of identifying errors during designing of the workflow, and thus able to correct them before the implementation phase. We illustrate the method with the workflow of the civil litigation in China as a case study.