View: An incremental approach to verify evolving workflows

Business processes (workflows) are typically the compositions of services (activities and tasks) and play a key role in every enterprise. Business processes need to be changed to react quickly and adequately to internal and external events. Moreover, each business process is required to satisfy certain desirable properties such as soundness, consistency, or some user-defined linear temporal logic (LTL) constraints. This paper focuses on the verification of evolving processes: given a business process, a change operation, and a set of LTL constraints, check whether all execution sequences of the evolved process satisfy all the given constraints. We propose a technique to incrementally check and verify the constraints of evolving business processes. Furthermore, we develop VIEW, a framework to model, change, and VerIfy Evolving Workflows and conduct a study to evaluate the effect of workflow characteristics on the performance of verification approaches. Experiments reveal several interesting factors concerning performance and scalability.