A Logic-Based Approach to Automatically Validate Knowledge-intensive Processes

Abstract

With the recent advances on Business Process Management (BPM) research and practice, organizations are changing their focus towards critical business processes that are poorly structured, dynamic and highly complex, known as Knowledge-intensive Processes (KiP). Due to their characteristics, typical BPM activities such as modeling, instantiation, validation and simulation of process models poses many challenges. This work proposes a rulebased strategy to instantiate, validate and simulate KiP models, and presents KIPAlloy, a computational tool that supports KIP modelling. The proposed strategy considers the Knowledge-intensive Process Ontology (KiPO) as a metamodel for modelling a KiP and transforms its rules into specifications in the Alloy logic-based language. We evaluate the applicability of the proposal in four different scenarios, in which we illustrate the use of the proposed KIPAlloy tool and discuss its benefits to process modelers.