Modeling business processes has become a common activity in industry, but it is increasingly carried out by non-experts. This raises a challenge: How to ensure that the resulting process models are of sufficient quality? This paper contends that a prior structuring of domain knowledge, as found in informal specifications, will positively influence the act of process modeling in various measures of performance. This idea is tested and confirmed with a controlled experiment, which involved 83 master students in business administration and industrial engineering from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Eindhoven University of Technology. In line with the reported findings, our recommendation is to explore ways to bring more structure in the specifications that are used as input for process modeling endeavors.

We present a formal semantics for a variant of UML2 Activity Diagrams that is used in the IBM WebSphere Business Modeler for modeling business processes. Business process models created in the IBM WebSphere Business Modeler or with other UML2 modeling tools often constitutes one of the key specification artifacts for building an information system that implements or supports the specified processes. As UML2 Activity Diagrams lack a universally agreed semantics, the step from specification to implementation usually faces a semantical impedance caused by different interpretation of the same diagram. A well-defined formal semantics for the specification language determines the interpretation of a diagram and allows for reasoning about as well as validating and verifying a given specification on common (formal) grounds. We adapt approaches for formalizing semantics of UML2 Activity Diagrams and apply them to the core features of the IBM WebSphere Business Modeler language for purpose of formal verification. We provide a parameterized Petri net pattern for each language concepts. A diagram is translated by instantiating a pattern for each use of a concept; merging the resulting Petri net fragments according to the structure of the original diagram yields a Petri net that specifies the behavioral semantics of the diagram. The resulting Petri net can be verified for control-flow errors using the model checker LoLA. The semantics has been implemented in a tool that is available at http://www.service-technology.org/uml2owfn/.

Usually, a component in a distributed system has assumptions about the remaining components of the system. A change in one component might require to change other components as well. It may happen that the change has to be performed in the running system. In this paper, we propose a formal model for systems that change their behavior at run-time: An adaptive system is denoted as a set of scenarios using a Petri net syntax. Our operational model provides an adaptation operator that synthesizes and adapts the system behavior as a Petri net branching-process at run-time based on the given scenarios. We show the feasibility of our approach by the help of an example.

In this paper we present a pattern-based approach for synthesizing truly distributed Petri nets from a class of LTL specifications. The synthesis allows for the automatic, correct generation of humanly conceivable Petri nets, thus circumventing a manual construction of nets, or the use of Büuchi automata which are not distributed and often less intuitive to understand.

The problem and need for adapting business processes and service behavior to cope with changing circumstances is identified well. Standard models for business processes still rely on a fixed process logic, the change of which is rather hard to achieve. Ad-hoc changes to a standard model are usually considered too `dangerous' as they are performed in not well-defined manner. Other models for adaptive processes deviate to some extent from established business process models. This deviation comes at the price of limited understandability and loss in analysis capabilities. We propose a model for adaptive processes based on Petri nets which have successfully been applied in modeling and analyzing business process and web services. Our operator to adapt the behavior of such models is formalized by the help of scenario-based concepts known from live-sequence charts in purely mathematical terms. This combination of concepts allows to write down the result of the adaptation rather than how adaptation shall be performed.

Enacting tasks in a workflow cannot always follow a pre-defined process model. In application domains like disaster management workflows are partially specified and circumstances of their enactment change. There exist various approaches for formal workflow models that are effective in such situations, like declarative specifications instead of operational models for formalizing flexible workflow process. These powerful models leave a gap to existing techniques in the domain of workflow modeling, workflow analysis, and workflow management. In this paper we bridge this gap with a compositional mechanism for translating declarative workflow models to operational workflow models. The mechanism is of a general nature and we reveal its principles as we provide an exemplary definition for translating DecSerFlow models based on LTL to Petri nets. We then demonstrate its use in analyzing and refining declarative models.

Fast and effective disaster management requires access to a multitude of heterogeneous, distributed, and quickly changing data sets, such as maps, satellite images, or governmental databases. In the last years, also the information created by affected persons on web sites such as flickr.com or blogger.com became an important and very quickly adapting source of information. We developed HUODINI, a prototype system for the flexible integration and visualization of heterogeneous data sources for disaster management. HUODINI is based on Semantic Web technologies, and in particular RDF, to offer maximal flexibility in the types of data sources it can integrate. It supports a hybrid push/pull approach to cater for the requirements of fast-changing sources, such as news feeds, and maximum performance for querying the integrated data set. In this paper, we describe the design goals underlying our approach, its architecture, and report on first experiences with the system.

The paradigm of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) provides a framework for interorganizational business processes and for the emerging programming-in-the-large. The basic idea of SOC, the interaction of services, rises a lot of issues such as proper termination of interacting services or substitution of a service by another one. Such issues can be addressed by means of models of services. We show how services can intelligibly be modeled, and we present algorithms and tools to analyze properties of service models. To make sure that our models properly reflect real world issues of services, we model and investigate services represented in established languages such as WS-BPEL.

In this thesis we develop a state space reduction technique for networks of timed automata based on unfoldings to alleviate the state space explosion problem due to concurrently enabled actions. For the purpose of verifying a system, standard model checking techniques construct its sequential state space that suffers an exponential growth when applied to distributed systems because of concurrently enabled, independent actions: during the construction of the state space these actions are ordered arbitrarily to simulate concurrency in the sequential model. For untimed systems, state space reduction techniques like stubborn sets that omit the construction of redundant information, and unfoldings that represent concurrent events in a partial order have successfully been applied to alleviate the exponential growth. These techniques apply a simple syntactical criterion to identify independent actions. This criterion is not applicable to networks of timed automata as simple examples show, which renders the existing techniques unapplicable. But networks of timed automata face the state space explosion problem as well which raises the demand for a specific reduction technique for these systems. In this thesis, we consider a special, but practically relevant class of networks of timed automata as a formal model for discrete, distributed, timed systems. We develop a novel technique that constructs a complete, finite representation of such a system's state space. This representation is the complete, finite prefix of an unfolding in which concurrently enabled actions are partially ordered. We show that this technique is capable of reducing the size of the state space by magnitude. We are presently not aware of any state space reduction technique for timed automata with similar results.

In this technical report we present an abstract operational semantics for the Business ProcessExecution Language for Web Services, or BPEL for short. In effect, the semantics defined herein are a variation and an extension of the semantics published first in [FGV04a] and [Far04] defined by the group of Uwe Glässer the Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. We namely add semantics for correlation handling, dead path elimination and event handling; we define the data handling on a finer level; we slightly alter the basic framework of how activities are formalized in [FGV04a] in order to achieve greater robustness against changes of the informal specification. Furthermore this technical report serves as a base for a joint work with the group of Simon Fraser University.

BPEL is presently the most prominent language to specify and execute business processes, using Web Services as its technological basis. Particular problems arise when activities are faulty: faults have to be propagated, other activities have to be irregularly terminated, etc. We describe the formal semantics of fault handlers and event handlers, demonstrating that ASMs are most adequate for this purpose.

In dieser Arbeit stellen wir einen Ansatz zur Definition einer formalen Semantik für die Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (kurz BPEL4WS) von IBM, Microsoft und deren Industriepartnern vor. Zur Formalisierung wählen wir den Abstract-State-Machine-Formalismus (kurz ASM), dessen theoretische Fundierung es uns erlaubt, die Semantik von BPEL4WS auf der selben Abstraktionsebene zur formalisieren, die in der informalen BPEL4WS-Spezifikation vorgegeben ist. Wir werden den inneren Aufbau der Sprache präzise, formal abbilden und damit eine intuitiv und anschaulich nachvollziehbare Entsprechung zwischen den Abläufen eines BPEL4WSProzesses gemäß der gegebenen informalen Semantik und unserer formalen Semantik aufzeigen. Dazu analysieren wir die Struktur von BPEL4WS und zeigen mit welchen Mitteln des ASM-Formalismus diese adäquat, formal erfasst werden und wie in ASM notierte Spezifikationen zu lesen sind. Hierzu werden wir beispielhaft ausgewählte, syntaktische Konstrukte von BPEL4WS nach unserem Ansatz formalisieren. Die vorliegende Arbeit bezieht sich auf die informale BPEL4WS-Spezifikation v1.1, veröffentlicht am 5. Mai 2003.

Moderne Systeme der Informationstechnik bestehen zumeist aus einer Vielzahl von Komponenten, die in einem Netzwerk auf verteilten Knoten ausgeführt werden. Mit dem Web-Service-Ansatz können solche Systeme einfacher und flexibler entwickelt werden. Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit der Modellierung, Visualisierung und Analyse von Web Services. Ein Web Service kapselt eine Anwendung und stellt diese über ein wohldefiniertes Interface der Außenwelt zur Verfügung. Im Gegensatz zu früheren Ansätzen dienen eine Reihe zusammenhängender Technologien zur Beschreibung eines Web Service. Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich vor allem mit der internen Struktur eines Web Service, beschrieben mit Hilfe der Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) [ACD+02]. Der Web-Service-Ansatz bietet ein homogenes Konzept von Komponenten und ihrer Komposition ber einem heterogenen Netzwerk. Damit ist die syntaktische Grundlage für die Entwicklung verteilter Systeme gelegt. Wesentlich für den Erfolg der Web Services ist jedoch die Beantwortung der semantischen Fragestellungen: Passen zwei gegebene Web Services inhaltlich zusammen? Kann in einem verteilten System ein gegebener Web Service durch einen anderen ersetzt werden? Entspricht ein konkreter Web Service einer gegebenen abstrakten Spezifikation? Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit der Beantwortung dieser und weiterer Fragestellungen im Web-Service-Ansatz: In einem ersten Schritt entwickeln wir eine formale Semantik für die Sprache BPEL4WS. Darauf aufbauend werden Methoden zur Analyse verteilter Systeme auf die konkreten Anforderungen bertragen und neue Verfahren entwickelt. Für die Diskussion der Modelle und Eigenschaften entwickeln wir eine intuitive graphische Repräsentation der Sprache BPEL4WS. Das Ziel der Forschungen ist die Umsetzung der Methoden in einem integrierten Entwicklungswerkzeug für BPEL4WS. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt die ersten Ergebnisse in einem laufenden Projekt.