Correctness-Preserving Configuration of Business Process Models

Reference process models capture recurrent business operations in a given domain such as procurement or logistics. These models are intended to be configured to fit the requirements of specific organizations or projects, leading to individualized process models that are subsequently used for domain analysis or solution design. Although the advantages of reusing reference process models compared to designing process models from scratch are widely accepted, the methods employed to configure reference process models are manual and error-prone. In particular, analysts are left with the burden of ensuring the correctness of the individualized process models and to manually fix errors. This paper proposes a foundation for configuring reference process models incrementally and in a way that ensures the correctness of the individualized process models, both with respect to syntax and behavioral semantics. Specifically, assuming the reference process model is behaviorally sound, the individualized process models are guaranteed to be sound.