A system for deduction-based formal verification of workflow-oriented software models

Abstract

The work concerns formal verification of workflow-oriented software models using the deductive approach. The formal correctness of a model’s behaviour is considered. Manually building logical specifications, which are regarded as a set of temporal logic formulas, seems to be a significant obstacle for an inexperienced user when applying the deductive approach. A system, along with its architecture, for deduction-based verification of workflow-oriented models is proposed. The process inference is based on the semantic tableaux method, which has some advantages when compared with traditional deduction strategies. The algorithm for automatic generation of logical specifications is proposed. The generation procedure is based on predefined workflow patterns for BPMN, which is a standard and dominant notation for the modeling of business processes. The main idea behind the approach is to consider patterns, defined in terms of temporal logic, as a kind of (logical) primitives which enable the transformation of models to temporal logic formulas constituting a logical specification. Automation of the generation process is crucial for bridging the gap between the intuitiveness of deductive reasoning and the difficulty of its practical application when logical specifications are built manually. This approach has gone some way towards supporting, hopefully enhancing, our understanding of deduction-based formal verification of workflow-oriented models.

Keywords

• formal verification
• deductive reasoning
• temporal logic
• semantic tableaux
• workflow patterns
• logical primitives
• generating logical specifications
• business models
• bpmn