Event-B Formalization of Basic Supply Chain Patterns

In recent years, as supply chains are increasingly becoming more valuable and dynamic, a large variety of compliance with high quality is needed for total safety and reliability. Several business process models were proposed to cope with the increasing risk and complexity of the supply chain operations and events, especially when the unexpected events, caused by the time dependent behaviors, occur. Formal verification approach becomes more interesting choice as the preventive checking of the safety and correctness of a real-time system specification from the very beginning of the design phase. In practice, a timed Petri net as a formal model is commonly used to graphically illustrate the time dependent behaviors of a real-time system. However, the simulation of the timed Petri net is tedious and inefficient for verifying the huge and complex realtime system. Alternatively, Event-B formalization approach provides an efficient and better automatic proving tool, whilst the writing Event-B specification from scratch needs the designer with the mathematical logic backgrounds. In this paper, we still encourage the drawing of an ordinary timed Petri net (OTPN) as a formal model of the supply chain events which is easier and more understandable in the first place. Moreover, we expect that several basic supply chain event patterns, as building blocks of ordinary timed Petri net notations, would help ease the construction of the formal model of the complex production processes. We hereafter propose a mean to transform the given ordinary timed Petri net of the supply chain event patterns into a complete Event-B specification which will be automatically proved by an Event-B prover called Rodin.