Instantaneous, Comprehensible, and Fixable Soundness Checking of Realistic BPMN Models

TL;DR

This paper presents a new tool for instant, understandable, and automatic soundness checking of BPMN models, capable of identifying, explaining, and fixing control-flow errors in real-time.

Contribution

The paper introduces an open-source, integrated BPMN soundness checker that provides instant error detection, visualization, and automatic correction suggestions, outperforming existing tools in speed and usability.

Findings

Soundness checking takes less than 500ms.

Tool effectively visualizes and explains violations.

Provides automatic fixes for identified errors.

Abstract

Many business process models have control-flow errors, such as deadlocks, which can hinder proper execution. In this paper, we introduce our new soundness-checking tool that can instantaneously identify errors in BPMN models, make them comprehensible for modelers, and even suggest corrections to resolve them automatically. We demonstrate that our tool's soundness checking is instantaneous, i.e., it takes less than 500ms, by benchmarking our tool against synthetic BPMN models with increasing size and state space complexity, as well as realistic models provided in the literature. Moreover, the tool directly displays possible soundness violations in the model and provides an interactive counterexample visualization of each violation. Additionally, it provides fixes to resolve the violations found, which are not currently available in other tools. The tool is open-source, modular, extensible, and integrated into a popular BPMN modeling tool.