Formal Semantics and Analysis of BPMN Process Models

Abstract

The Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a standard for capturing business processes in the early phases of system development. The mix of constructs in BPMN makes it possible to define models with a range of semantic errors. But the static analysis of BPMN models to detect such errors is hindered by ambiguities in the standard specification and the complexity of the language. The fact that BPMN integrates constructs from graph-oriented process definition languages with features for concurrent execution of multiple instances of a subprocess and exception handling, makes it challenging to provide a formal semantics of BPMN. Even more challenging is to provide a semantics that can be used to analyse BPMN models. This paper proposes a formalisation of BPMN in terms a mapping to Petri nets, for which efficient analysis techniques exist. The mapping has been implemented as a tool that generates code in the Petri Net Markup Language. The formalisation has led to the identification of deficiencies in the BPMN specification.