Formal Semantics and Verification of BPMN Transaction and Compensation

Business process modeling is getting a lot of attention as a predominant technology to bridge the Business-IT gap. It bridges the gap by describing business processes using a notation understandable by all relevant users from the business analysts to the technical developers. Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), defined by Object Management Group (OMG), is a standard notation for describing business processes. One of the distinguishing features of BPMN is support of transactions and compensation in business processes. In BPMN, cancellation of a transaction triggers rollback of the transaction and compensation for specific activities in the transaction. This feature makes it possible to depict down-to-earth business processes. However, the specification of the notation does not include formal semantics. The informal description of the semantics for transactions and compensation makes the specification confusing. This paper shows how Petri net (PN) can give semantics to a transaction and compensation of BPMN and the formal semantics makes the specification clear. This paper also shows that we can apply reachability and coverability analysis of PN to verification of business processes with transactions and compensation.