Content-based validation of business process modifications

Researchers become increasingly interested in developing tools for evaluating the correctness of business process models. We present a methodology for content-based validation of changes to business processes, relying on an automatic extraction of business logic from real-life business process repositories. Each process step in a repository is automatically transformed to a descriptor - containing objects, actions, and related qualifiers. From the collection of descriptors we induce taxonomies of action sequence, object lifecycle, and object and action hierarchies that form the logical foundation of the presented validation process. The method utilizes these taxonomies to identify process deficiencies that may occur due to process model modification, and suggests alternatives in order to correct and validate the models.